I'll chime in here - as DerStrom8 mentioned there is advertising revenue from the site and although we tend to favor open source where we can, our hosting costs are very high to maintain a high quality of service and uptime. We are not actually that large of a company and have minimal IT help so we also opt for managed servers + some level of cloud services. But most important to djsfantasi's comment - ETO is dependent on moderators to keep the content on target /quality high on the site that then creates a win for all. Our goal is to create great resources for engineers and professionals across all our channels, so helpful user input with moderator support is more than appreciated here.