As the title says, Listen Before You Buy can no longer sustain itself and it’s becoming too costly for me to keep it running, so it’s with great regret that I have to close it down.
Nah, just playin’. This place isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet anyway, but it is becoming too costly for me to keep it running the way it is at the moment. You might’ve noticed that the site’s been going down more often than usual lately and I suppose some of that is to be expected as we grow, but yesterday when it went down I spoke to my host’s customer service and they said that in order for me to keep the site stable it’s going to take me quadrupling my resources. Here are the technical details:
When I started the site I was using DreamHost’s shared hosting plan for $35 a year but as the site grew it became unstable due to the increased volume in traffic, so towards the end of last year/start of this year I upgraded to a VPS which is far more stable and reliable, but is also more expensive. I started off at using 300MB a month for $15 and it was fine, but it didn’t take long for that to not be enough, so I upped it to 400, then 500, and now it’s mostly at 700MB for $35 a month but if I get spikes in traffic or just busy days I have to up it to at least 1,100MB, which is $55 a month.
What I do though is just up it to get through the spike and then reduce it usually later in the day so it’s not costing me a lot of money (when you’re poor and paying for this out of your own pocket anyway, an extra $55 a month is a lot of money), but when I spoke to this CS rep yesterday he said that with how much the site is using that to keep it stable means I’d have to keep it at 1,500-2,000MB, and that’s $100 a month at the top end. People tell me I should change hosts and I’d love to, but I can’t find one with unlimited bandwidth, disk usage, and disk space that is cheaper so for now I’m stuck.
Now I do make a small amount of money from the site, but it’s small enough to the point where because I don’t generate enough in a month I don’t get paid until I hit their desired threshold. This is through links like Amazon, eMusic, iTunes, and Insound mostly found on Albums where you can listen to and purchase music, but obviously not enough people are doing that.
One other possibility is that the theme/design we’re using could be eating up all of the resources so finding a new theme or getting a new design might help (any generous web designers wanna hook a brother up?), but that can take months of looking, playing around with them, customising it and making sure it all works. It’s something I want to do with the site but it’s down the line a while, so in the meantime I’m afraid we’re going from Ad-Free to Not-Ad-Free.
If you use an Ad blocker then this likely won’t affect you, but we’re not just going to spam you with giant banner flashing Ads for iPods and deodorant, it’s going to be geared towards what we do here; promoting new artists, amazing music, live shows, vinyl, and everything else in between and they’ll be more creative and discreet. Hopefully enough people will click the Ads in order for me to make enough to keep the site running, though this isn’t coming right away, this is likely a month or so down the line but depending on how things work out it may be sooner.
I’ve always said I hate Ads, and I still do, and I’ve always said I wanted the site to remain Ad-free, and I still do but I also never thought it’d cost this much a month to keep it running. If you have any ideas about alternative methods to advertising or creative ways to do it, please get in touch but this is not the place to promote your OWN hosting company or affiliate network (you can email me with those), but suggestions are welcome.
Connect with Listen Before You Buy - Facebook | Twitter | Last.fm | Soundcloud | Albums
Completely unrelated, but everyone needs their minds blown a little bit every now and again.
