Taking refuge in a COVE?

By a nice, or should I say inconvenient, coincidence, he subject of disappearing online resources has resurfaced at VICTORIA.  "Coincidence," because a nice Hannah More archive that was available the last time I taught one of this semester's courses, just two years ago, has now mysteriously vanished.  Granted, the world is not full of people with a yen to read Hannah More--even my yen to read Hannah More is somewhat modest--but the Cheap Repository Tracts are important, and it would be nice if they were available in annotated form.  Still, I'm hardly the only scholar to worry about the fate of scholarly digital projects, which have had a bad habit of dissolving into their constituent pixels the second someone moves, retires, and/or loses their funding.   In any event, in the course of the thread, Dino Felluga announced a new project, COVE, or Central Online Victorian Educator, which has as part of its goal working around the "now you see it, now you don't" aspect of digital resources that can make them so nerve-wracking for their users (and, one assumes, for their producers).  The site is not yet fully live, but you can see some of their future e-text publications.  What's interesting, though, is the site's goal of generating "not-for-profit income to sustain the future development of tools and publication of COVE material."  On the one hand, scholars have been used, I think, to casually dividing online resources into Free (To Me, Anyway) Sites and Either I Need to Win the Lottery or My University Needs Untoward Quantities of Cash Sites (that last may be a trifle exaggerated, but perhaps not by much).  But, as COVE notes, openly-accessible sites aren't free; even a blog like this one requires an influx of cash ($179.40/yr, to be precise), and something far more elaborate, with lots of interactive tools, images, complex e-texts, moderating behind the scenes, &c. requires considerably more in the way of dollar signs.  Hence the evanescence of many sites.  It will be interesting to see how they succeed in producing a self-funding model that avoids becoming, as they say, "avaricious."