No, I am not Shakespeare nor am I contemplating suicide. My domain name registration and hosting for my chess site located at http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com are coming up for renewal in December. I need to decide between now and then if I want to renew the web site and keep it on the Internet or just let it die. To be honest, I have gotten discouraged lately and am leaning toward removing all of my sites from the Internet. None of my sites have earned any real money and I have gotten tired of losing money on web site hosting and domain name registration! On the chess site I have links for books that people can buy from Amazon.com and Google AdSense ads. So far, I have earned a whopping $13 from Amazon and it has taken me almost two years to earn less than $50 from AdSense! At 4 to 7 cents per click it will take me forever to get to the $100 minimum to get a check from Google!
To add to my discouragement I put a button on my home page asking people to donate to my site to help me cover the costs of keeping the site up. So far, I have yet to receive even ten cents from anyone! To make matters worse, I put a poll on my site asking people to tell me what incentive they want to donate. I have yet to get one person to answer my poll question! I am going to change the poll to ask if I should keep the site up or take it down. If no one answers that poll question then I may very well take that site down. If I do leave it up, it will be because I want to use it as an example of my work while seeking a job as a webmaster. If you want to help me out by answering my new poll question you can go to http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com/Poll.php and answer my question. I would appreciate the input.
Chess
2 comments:
Hey Mike.
I voted "no" to the poll question-- that you should not renew the domain hosting. Your site is very thorough and well-designed, but i think no one should pay for personal-website hosting! There are dozens and dozens of free hosts available, many with zero advertising. ballz.ababa.net/ comes to mind as a reliable free one. Why not move everything to a free host? This would give you the best of both worlds-- you'd still get web traffic and meager ad revenue but you wouldnt incur hosting expenses. The only negative is your new address would be some gibberish like host.com/username but this is not such a big deal, is it?
Personally i would never donate any money, not even 10 cents, for a chess website. Maybe if it had cutting edge pdf/pgn/media content like chesslecture.com or chesspublishing.com, but even then probably not. There is simply too much free chess content on the web, usually posted by masters and GMs for an amateur (like you or me) to be in a position to ask for money from chess blogging. Supply of amateur chess blogs/sites is saturated compared to demand. I have a modest chess blog too but i've never considered it as a commercial vehicle. I just enjoy the game, as you do, and that is enough. For me, regular visitors and comments are more payment than i ever expected. This comment is my donation to you. GL!
-Patrick
Hi Patrick,
If I fail to keep the same domain name then I lose all of the links that I have from search engines and other chess sites. The hosting for this site is only $20 per year, so that is something that I am willing to live with. I am not willing to live with all of the redirects I would have to do if I failed to keep the same domain name for my site!
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