Voat’s growth is exponential. From Alexa rankings, to http requests, to user accounts, and database size, everything at Voat is growing fast; perhaps a bit too fast for two guys with full time jobs. ;)

Relative growth related metrics (Since TheFattening):

Our hosting costs at Voat have increased by 12,143% per month Our database size has increased by 761% Our user count has increased by 636% Our CDN has reduced site data by 1.5 TB in the last 24 hours We’ve dealt with over 5 million requests per hour at our peak

With such rapid growth we’ve come to realize that areas of Voat are currently lacking critical functionality. These areas include:

Community functionality including effective donation systems, account preference settings, and content categorization and related filtering. (Block users anyone?) Moderator functionality included permission sets, communication, and ease of use. Administrator functionality including subverse transfers, user badging, user account assistance, software deployment, code management, and related communication. Spam/Bot algorithms, detection, and prevention. Denial of services infrastructure including intrusion detection systems.

The challenge for us is on two fronts; to deal with growth related concerns or to concentrate on expanding Voat’s functionality. At times there will be a conflict between these two goals. The choice to turn off registrations was a hard one. We know the negative side to this. We apologize. It’s a temporary sacrifice so we can regroup, reprioritize our goals, and establish a clear vision of our short term and long term goals for Voat.

Financing is an issue that is still being pursued. We are currently paying out of pocket to host Voat (you guys are super expensive with all your mouse clicks!). Your donations have helped tremendously to these offset expenses and we love each of you who donated, but we are on a whole new level now. Take for example that the total amount of all donations received didn’t entirely cover our first month in the cloud.

What everyone here needs to know is that both @Atko and I feel we have a great community here at Voat. We want to build our culture with this community and around it. We want this community to be the life blood of Voat going forward. We are all here for one main reason and it’s because of this ideal that Voat will become a wild success.

We will post more info soon about what changes are coming to the registration process. We have some code to write beforehand but we will make a separate announcement soon. Please be patient.