Drako's Website Services

So you may have noticed ads on a site "Powered by DWS"
You may be thinking "Ads are annoying and/or a waste of my precious bandwidth."

Please Remember:
We are a volunteer staff.
We offer FREE website services to Content Owners - Including Website Creation and Advertising.
We cannot be obligated to pay for hosting we may or may not be able to afford.
We rely on any server space that is offered to us for FREE.
We focus on providing Quality Content on our sites.
We would like to continue offering our FREE services for the foreseeable future.

We understand, and in many cases, agree:
Ads can be very annoying. Especially popups and ads that make noise.
And we're sure that if you install anything "free" on your device, that it may have forced ads upon you as well.
It's the same way on other sites like Google, Facebook, or even Xtube...
They are just as ad laden as any of our sites - it just might not be as obvious.
Did you know a vast majority of those "click bait" articles and links you see on sites like Facebook are actually paid ads?
They sneak it into the content and even customize it to fit things you are into (going so far as to tracking your browsing habits to do so).
Honestly, we think that "hiding" your ads in the content of your site is sneaky, wrong, and just plain evil.
And that tracking a users' browsing habits is in violation of your privacy rights...but even GOOGLE does that (AdSense).

However, we are very lucky:
A decent amount of the ads shown by our servers are somehow related to the content of the site itself.
The ads are usually only in 1 of 3 places - Top, Bottom, and/or Popup (sometimes along the side) - making it easy to skip over the ads and enjoy the actual site content, or not even see the ads because they were under that content and therefore just as easily ignored.
Our own Ad Bars (on the top and bottom) actually act as a break between the site content and any server ads - making it easy to identify where the ads end and the site content begins.

We understand ads are annoying but:
The hosting bill has to be paid somehow.
We cannot afford, or be obligated to pay for hosting as volunteers.
We would much rather focus on providing quality content and less time worrying about obvious ads on our sites.
We are grateful that we are even offered any server space for free, even if it means having ads on our sites.
Since we use space given to us for free, we have little/no say in if the server places ads on our sites.

Sure, we could move the sites from servers that force a lot of ads - or ads we disagree with, but:
We would spend more time moving all the sites, and less time providing Quality Content on those sites.
The server we move to could end up closing suddenly, or become just as bad - or worse - with their ads.
Sites could end up getting lost entirely, or trusted less with each server move. (Stability creates trust.)

You actually came to this page from 1 of 2 of our own official ad bars, which we tend to keep to a minimum.
We have our Header: Which has the DWS Banner Exchange and Sponsor Ads that help pay for our time.
And our Footer: Which is typically a banner exchange program we setup for each site to help increase traffic.

Any other ads would be ads placed by our servers, and we fully understand why they place ads on our sites and we are extremely grateful they offered us the space for FREE.

We do try to keep ads to a minimum ourselves, but in the ever changing world of the internet, we have to accept that if we're using free servers, we may have to endure ads on our sites. Even if they become cumbersome and/or we disagree with the ad placement or the ads themselves.

We strive to provide quality content on all the sites we operate,
and provide a quality service to the Content Owners who ask us to make sites for them.
We also strive to maintain stability for all the sites we operate and create for our Content Owners.

This includes Drako's Den and Playground - Our own community projects.
The users' of our own community projects are all part owners of the sites
as the Content Owners of the content they submit to our Communities.

While we agree ads are annoying, they are a necessary evil.
You should go to and use a website for its content and offerings/features, without taking ads into consideration.
If you do go to a site for its content: Then for us, it would be easy to skip past the ads and enjoy/partake in said content.
(And not end up getting suckered by "click bait ads" like on Facebook.)
In many cases, the ads do not denote the content, and also do not retract from that content.