By: Scot Bontrager
The Oct 5 1999 edition of the Rantings and Ravings caught
my attention. I thought I'd add my two cents to the issue.
Running a domain is hard work. With a long, distorted
geopod URL people
realize you are a fan site. When your domain is something
offical looking
(like www.sailormoon.org) people judge your site with a new
level of
rudeness. Moving from a quasi-anonymous URL to a domain is
not something
that should be taken lightly.
Yes, you will get more hits if your domain is obvious. But
some domains I
know (www.moonprincess.com, for example) are good names,
but rarely do
people find these by randomly typing in domain names. I was
fortunate
enough to get sailormoon.org when the first owner let it
slip, little did
I know what I was getting into.
I'll let everyone in on some inside knowledge.
SailorMoon.org loses money
every month. We get about $50 a month from banner rotation,
and about $200
a quarter (every three months) from Amazon.com and CDNOW.
That sounds like
enough to cover hosting until you realize that we own our
own hardware,
have over a GB of files and move over 2GB of data a day. No
free hosting
company is going to let us store a GB of files for free. No
cheap hosting
company is going to put up with 2GB of traffic a day.
Hosting for us is
about $350 a month. On a good month we lose $200 on hosting
alone. Forget
hardware costs if something breaks.
Don't even get me started on the time I spend on the site.
Three, four,
eight hours a day writing code, indexing images, fixing
bugs and dealing
with users who don't understand why we require real names.
Are we going to shut down because of the costs? Not this
week. Maybe
someday. Right now I can afford it and I do it because I
love it. If I
ever get to a point that I can't afford it I'll shut it
down. If I ever
stop loving it I'll shut it down. However, if you have a
chance, click on
our ads--it really does help.
Does a domain guarntee you hits? No. Does it guarntee your
web site will
be great? Heck no. What does a domain do? It makes your
website easy to
find. That's it. Nothing else.
I think sailormoon.aq would be a great domain name.
I thought TuxedoMask.GQ would
be a great domain to own (GQ is Equitorial Guenna) but I'm
not about to get another domain right now.
Comments on this article can be sent to: Scot Bontrager.
