Last week the GSS was down. I was very sad. The SDA team explains the situation:
Part of the popularity of our demonstration archive is that it is free for end users. We are happy to provide this service. It is a valuable resource for the academic community and it also publicizes the value of our SDA software. However, the flip side of providing this free service is that it does not generate any income to offset the cost of providing the infrastructure required. We receive no funding from GSS for hosting their datasets -- which is often a surprise to our users. Almost all of our income comes from the fees provided by licensing the SDA software to other data archives (like ICPSR and IPUMS), and virtually all of that income goes to support the programming and technical support that we provide them. We obviously need some additional sources of revenue.
