Here's some more ideas:

  • Pay for better response time. There'd be some sort of subscription service, $X per month, which would make E2 give your requests priority over other requests. By the time there would be enough subscribers so that non-subscribers would notice a slowdown, there should be enough money to buy another server to speed things up again.
  • Subscriptions for things that take more storage space and/or processing time. For instance:
    • Allow more 10 links in the personal nodelet.
    • Allow the user to watch certain nodes, and be emailed when new writeups have been added, old writeups have been modified, or new softlinks have been added. This would probably be the nodes in the user's bookmarks.
    • Allow the user to specify certain searches, and be emailed whenever new nodes or writeups matching those searched are created.
  • Earmark all donations towards things that would increase the response time and performance of E2, like new servers or more memory for old servers. I think people would be more willing to donate if they thought it was going to give the something visible, like better performance, than if it was just going towards stuff like paying for the net connection. You could also put stuff like "Only $300 more needed for a new server!" on the front page and nightly emails.
  • Put up the list of bugs and feature enhancements, sorted by priority, and let people donate money to increase the priority of fixes/improvements that they're interested in.
  • Do stuff to encourage donation of time to the Everything Engine by people who aren't members of edev. Give non-edev people who send in good patches extra XP, votes and C!s. Also, if they fix/implement a bug/feature that had money donated on it, give that money to that person.