Good news about the site's financial side

[Red Squirrel]

I've been organizing myself more in terms of finances for my business and such. For this site I decided that advertising will strictly be for keeping the site alive. So I made a spread sheet to keep track of the money I make and the money I spend on the site (hosting). So I counted the hosting, so far it's about 300 bucks which is not bad at all to consider it's been 1 year, and we're good till next april without paying more. Then I counted all the advertising money I made, and the balance comes up to about 100 bucks extra.

So that means this site is not even close to costing me money, it's paying itself + giving me more money which will go towards a dedicated server when we need one. We are far from being able to afford a dedicated server, but at least with this tracking sheet I'll be able to see exactly how far we are, and wether the site is brining in money, or costing money.

I will soon setup a system where people can pay to advertise per impression so it should bring more advertising money and it will be easy to manage as they just select a package, send me a check, and I insert them in the database. It will most likely be an ad rotator, or seperate ads on seperate parts of the site. We are still small, so I can't charge too much, but every little bit of money helps and it all goes in the site's balance.

For now I'm simply saving it for a future dedicated server. That or a dedicated connection so I can do hosting with my own server(s). I would not feel comfortable enough to do hosting off a remote server, simply because I don't know enough about linux yet to do everything remotely, and if it would crash or freeze I would have no clue what to do, so if we get a dedicated server it would probably be just us on it.

Oh and how this makes it good news for everyone? 1) no need to worry about the site costing too much and shutting down, and 2) I won't ask for donations and get mad at those who don't donate. (I've seen this happen at some sites)

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:2302, old post ID:19570