3K is just not enough to make me budge.
To Alla the Alla sites were his full-time employment, paying his bills, health insurance, caring for the family, retirement, etc etc, same with Illa afaik, plus they were paying part time coders such as Danalog to do some of the coding. Add bandwidth and server resource requirements, and you are looking at a whole lot of money that needs to be brought in every single month.
The monetaty cost to run QCDN is currently $1,285/year.
Between the premium subscription, the previously lower hosting cost ($60/month), and adsense I was able to pay for that and hand some of the cash back out in form of contest. Now that we are at $100/month for hosting things do not look as good anymore, but there is enough cash to pay for hosting, so it's all good.
If I had more money, I would hire a programmer that would customize the heck out of vBulletin to make this site really shine. There is a lot that can be done to make the site more userfriendly, more useful in terms of added features, and of course looks (though we should be getting that $250 FFXI themed skin any day now).
I would love to run contest where the rewards are such that they attract more than half a dozen entires and less than 50 votes.
I would love to pay someone to effectivly promote QCDN among other FFXI sites, as well as market it to advertisers.
I would love to put out that Quetzalcoatl Tribune thing monthly, there is any number of things that would either be possible, or would simply work better/more efficiently, if I had cash to throw at it.
Any of those things require major time committments from the people that would be involved. Most everyone is simply not willing to give up that much of their time for essentially nothing, and I don't blame them at all.
Anyway, the point is that a larger operating budget makes things easier on the owner/admin, and often better for the end-user.
Leave to go where?
Sure, some hardcore folks will leave, so what, at 6 million page views a day it doesn't matter much if you lose a couple hundred people. Content wins! 99.99999999% of those who bitch about RMT on QCDN have no problem using somepage, same with alla really, the ideologists will leave, everyone else will enjoy the new and speedy site that provides players with an exceptional collection of resources.