Donating is extremely important for the website, because it helps secure the websites future. It won't, unfortunately, fix any down-time though because that's more of a hardware problem, we're currently running a VPS, rather than a dedicates server which we ran before because of donation issues. But to be perfectly honest, we've actually had less downtime with the VPS than with the Dedicates server, so it hasn't made all that much difference.
Also, there's kind of a bit of iffiness with where the donations go, I find...