Hey guys,
I guess I need to address this question as I have before:
This site has been free for many years, over 10 years of free downloads to be accurate. I've spent over 100k out of my own pocket over those years, because I believed in helping others whom I met while working in S.Korea, and abroad. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, I got ill and had to leave work (which paid well at the time), I got better, then worse again after an accident. Albeit, I still wanted to have waygook functional for everyone. Long story short, I didn't have any funds, and services would have shutdown with all the hosted content.
Paid subscriptions were implemented to help cover the hosting costs, which now involve over 12 dedicated front end servers, a large database, a fileserver, as well as a proxy for managing the front-end traffic. Download speeds are incredible even at peak times, the problem you've encountered is a bottleneck with the framework as I had to use many join queries for the landing page, otherwise it would run much smoother during high-load conditions. The fee you pay is kept minimal, barely the cost of a coffee a month if you subscribe yearly. It's fair considering the expenditures on my end as I don't have capital funding like some other sites.
I perform regular updates at this point. However, there is a roadmap for a complete overhaul that entails new servers, different databases, and an entirely new code base built from the ground up. It's a lot of work, and may require additional hands. This is what was envisioned for phase 3 of the roadmap, while phase 1 and 2 have been completed. Waygook still sees a lot of traffic, it's hardly on its way out, it's only getting bigger by the day.
I know people need it, that's the only reason I keep it running.
