Whew. I thought this blog was kind of expensive!

The Apologetics Index and Religion News Blog costs have to be prohibitive for Anton Heins who is on a medical disability.
Anton lives in the Netherlands. To say The Apologetics Index is a labour of love is trite. It is an immense volume of work. The Religion News Blog remains one of the best religious news tracking sites I’ve had the opportunity to read. The cross-referencing is top notch.

Having said that, I read the Index has had a steady growth in readers recently. And I knew that the increase in readers had caused technical problems.

But I had no idea it would cost so much to provide these resources.
Anton has been online for years and does all his own work.

Earlier today, Apologetics Index was unavailable for several hours. Consistently high traffic rates have caused the site to use more than its share of server resources.

While we are pleased to see that Apologetics Index continues to grow in popularity, our web host provider has let us know that we must move the site to a dedicated server. That means the server would be used only by Apologetics Index, and the site would thus not have to share the server’s resources with other websites. This would be ideal, were it not for the fact that our shoestring budget cannot deal with the extra expense of a dedicated server (in addition to the current monthly cost of a semi-dedicated server for Religion News Blog).

One option suggested by our web host is to move both Apologetics Index and Religion News Blog to one dedicated server. Doing so would still increase our monthly server costs to $170.00.

That is not chump change.
Too bad some churches or organizations or seminaries or bloggers or server types can’t commit to contribute financially with no strings attached for a decided length of time.
Churches are quick to talk about culture ‘wars’ or ‘nfluencing the culture, and missions, while this volume of work has been up and running for years. This Index is meat, not a how to or 40 day program. We are also quicket o talk about the need for Christians to have a strong online presence. This is one of them. It is already there for everyone who wants to learn.

I think of it as an apologetics course for ordinary people; for those of us who wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to step into a seminary or don’t have access to fancy textbooks. It is for those of us ready to look at the larger world, learn discernment, be Bereans. It’s like being able to step into a cyber-seminary-library to read, learn and study at leisure.
Worthwhile mission projects are often right under our nose.