If you feel that is more practical just go straight to google, then there's no reason for you not to do it The point of shareminer is to make a tedious process quick. Personaly iI prefer use shareminer firefox quickserch plugin, I don't even need to go anywhere. But, hey that's me. There is audience for a site that performs a simple task like shareminer, in fact is a huge audience, therefor, I'll keep it up.
I scale to the maximum of what the hosting plan could handle. Half a million http requests a day.... I had to come up with a smaller version to keep the site running smoothly. I don't really know what to do, I don't really feel like going for a dedicated server, I've been a server admin before, it requires to much work and worries with the server all the time. don't know... we'll see. BTW,don't go for dreamhost, they suck. They anounce all those huge values of BW and storage, that's basically bullshit. Despite my massive traffic I still use less than 1% of the bandwidth i suposely could use. In other words: no way you can deliver all that bandwidth they sell you. They will throttle the connections to your site long before you use it. In fact, I would say you're lucky if you manage to use 25% of it.
I miss having the option of using the cached version of the webpage to be able to jump directly to the area that I'm interested in. Now many times the links are blocked behind the forums which require you to register into each one individually...