I'm sorry that we haven't helped you to understand why we have had to make adjustments to our site in order to ensure that Appliantology continues to be a valuable and powerful information tool to professional appliance technicians even in the face of rising costs and changing conditions, while still honoring our older lifetime members.

We have not taken away your ability to download as many files as you want from the Download section. You still have unlimited file download counts and bandwidth. Only the speed at which those files download has been changed.

Lifetime memberships were offered at a time when the vast majority of support for the site came from parts sales, NOT from memberships. Those sales went sharply downward starting in 2012 (due to increased competition from other sites and especially Amazon / eBay), and we ended our lifetime memberships because we could see that the site would not be able to support itself without annual memberships and the ability to adapt to changing market conditions.

Now you make statements that paying members are more valuable so they keep the transfer rates the same. 

No, we are saying that the paying members are are what makes it possible to have a powerful server that can handle all the current resource demands of our downloads section in order for it to continue to be a useful resource for ALL of our members. And it is only logical that someone paying $109 per year should have a faster service over someone who paid a one-time fee of less than $100 almost 4 years ago.

All of our members are valuable, but there has to be a way to allocate resources based on how much money or time our members give to the site. Otherwise, why would anyone pay more? Many lifetime members have, thankfully, upgraded their memberships to Professional Appliantologist, which is why Appliantology continues to be a growing, strong resource even with the downturns and challenges of a changing market in parts sales.

And our lifetime members who have not made that switch continue to be valued and to benefit from the ongoing participation of paying members.

Example story as to why this is wrong. I go to an apartment building to look at apartment to rent. I check everything out including the water at the faucet & toilets and the water is flowing out nicely. I sign a life time agreement to rent the apartment. One year later I notice the water is hardly coming out of the faucet & toilets. I complain to the owner and he says he turned down the water pressure to my apartment because the building has more tenants and the plumbing system cant handle it even after an upgrade. The water pressure was only turned down in apartments that where paying or paid less rent. The newer tenants have normal pressure because they pay more rent and the owner cant afford to loose them.   

This analogy would only come close to working if the landlord put in a much bigger and better water delivery system after ending the lifetime offerings, and only the tenants paying the current rate had access to it at full capacity. 

Our lifetime agreement promised access, not speed. We continue to honor the access that was promised. Given the growth of the site (funded by our annual members) over the last couple of years, including a download section bigger than we could have imagined even just a few years ago, I'd say you and the other "lifetimers" got an extremely good deal!

I just asked our IT guy about this (yes, we even have to pay another person to help us run this site, it has gotten so much busier and more complicated as we've improved it) and he said that if you tried to upload more than one file at a time, or canceled a download while it was in progress, it may take a bit of time to reset. He's not sure how long - hours? Perhaps it will be ready by tomorrow morning. 

We have not heard from any other users recently of any other issues with downloads, btw.

We've worked with you previously to get you cleared when we put the bandwidth restrictions in place. We were responsive when it was clear that was not an ideal way to deal with server allocation and quickly made changes. 

We are not trying to coerce anyone to do anything. As this site has grown as a resource for professional techs, as we've devoted more of our resources towards it, we have simply offered several paths for our users. Our older "lifetime" members have evaluated how they use Appliantology and made decisions based on that. Many have opted for the Professional membership because they rely on it frequently for their business and value what it has become. Many use it lightly and are content to continue with their old membership. Still others contribute to the community enough (via forum posts) that they get a free Appliantology Fellow membership.