I'm sorry, call me an idiot, flame and troll me if you will, but I think the decision they made to get 3x servers with a lot of ram wasn't stupid at all. In fact, if I was running a site that was 4chan, I probably would have taken the same idea. Dell don't exactly make shit hardware, it is commonplace gear, it has good support from the company and it works well. It's not some no-name brand with some crappy random hardware. I could sit here and scream about how they aren't using X hardware on X operating system with X webserver config, however what they have in place works well for them. Hell, the apache setup they use to ban people, I use here.

I think they made a simple mistake out of all of this: they didn't communicate with the community as much. To try and solve all of this a simple thread asking their users "well, what do you think we should buy with your donations?" might have prevented a lot of this drama. People who have put in part of their salary's will no doubt want to put in 2c of their opinion. And no doubt with a community the size of 4chan that there would be professional, informed opinions of people who have a clue about these things.