I have been running U2MoL for nearly thirteen years, always on web servers that either belonged to the University or my ISP (i.e. using bandwidth and server space that I never had to pay for), but as the time passes I get more and more interested in renting space in a web hotel somewhere. The idea has been that I then could improve the site quite tremendously (e.g. using PHP instead of static HTML pages so there could be better ways of contacting me and contributing to the site [I'm not very found of the idea of a Wiki for U2MoL for historical reasons, but it would be a possibility!]), but it would cost me a bit and since I have no statistics for the site traffic I do not know how much it would cost me.
I don’t like adverts myself, I hate them, but I have come to terms with Googles text based AdSense, and come to the conclusion that what I hate with web adverts are the animated ads (”Click the monkey!!!!!!!”). I usually don’t like the banner-like ads Google usually use, but I checked out the system and found that I could use a number of different sizes and think I could find some that might fit the purpose. I would then use a size that doesn’t obstruct the page and use a bit of taste in the placement.
Or am I just greedy? I have no idea how big the traffic is and if I would make any amount of money that it is worth the effort (I learned from a friend of mine that you need about 100,000 hits to get $50, so I won’t retire from my day job just quite yet). Besides, I rely on the work of others for the site and even if the money would be used to finance the site (and encourage me to work on it), I find it an interesting moral dilemma.
As I’ve rented space at a webhotel (Dreamhost to be specific) I can now get better statistics for the site, but it will take some time before all the traffic to my old site has moved here.
What do you think? Please leave a comment and tell me what you think.