The short answers:
Yes I know what it costs to run the site and no we don't solicit donations or charge money to access anything here.
The long answers:
Intercept is privately funded by radio enthusiasts/professionals. We have invested in a substantial amount of dedicated processing power (cluster of HP BladeSystem c7000's), storage (NetApp FAS6080's) and bandwidth (multiple OCx and Fiber circuits). I can say our capital and recurring costs are a generous amount however posting specific numbers would infringe on the privacy of our donor(s). So far we've made it almost 15 years without asking for donations and hope to keep it that way as long as possible.
That being said, our mission here is similar to that of Wikipedia in that we provide a non-profit place to freely share information without charging money for content or displaying ads. This is an important distinction because anything contributed here benefits everybody rather than an individual or corporate entity.
As a side note, internet advertising has such an abysmal rate of return that websites have to take a crap all over your screen just to make a fraction of a cent. Would you rather see the content you are interested in or see it buried in the middle of a mess like this ?:
