| abstract | - The overwhelming popularity of some fan sites caused them problems. Popular fan sites were overcome with traffic, so many servers could not handle them, and most sites on free servers spent part of the day down. In order to handle the traffic, webmasters had to pay for more bandwidth. Some of the most popular sites were paying thousands of dollars a month from their own pocket to keep the site alive. To solve the problem of webmasters paying large amounts of money for downloading, some sites, such as The Sims Resource, went pay. Subscriptions pay for the bandwidth and have allowed some sites to have their sites put on more reliable servers. Nervertheless, SimsHost closed because it "never reached break-even and the gulf between operating costs and revenues from subscriptions and downloads grew to the point that SimsHost was losing more money than [they] could possibly afford." Instead of becoming a pay site, some fan sites have elected to take donations, some even offer a gift in return.
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