MyADSL finances

rpm

rpm

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Hi folks

Thanks again for all the support…truly a pleasure to see.

I have given the matter some thought and I think it is necessary to create a stable financial situation for MyADSL. This means that the site and ‘company’ as a whole must be able to sustain itself. I will continue to cover most of the costs but it will be good to have some backup funds in case of unforeseen incidents and even to pay for a member/s to attend meetings etc. Since I am in Cape Town it will not always be possible for me to attend meetings in Johannesburg or Pretoria.

There are a few choices regarding the accumulation of funds:

Donations from members
Advertising
Commercial partnerships

I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of members that came forward through the forum and email suggesting they would like to make donations, but I don’t want MyADSL to be another charity in South Africa. I think we should go the advertising route, but with a small twist. The advertising should be very affordable which means that if a member would like to sponsor the site he/she can simply purchase advertising space for a limited period of time. If they do not want to advertise their company they can simply have a line like: Sponsored by BTTP etc. I must say that I do not like the idea of advertising on a site but the latest bill was a surprise, and I guess I woke up to the commercial realities of South African hosting and business. I will have to cut the girlfriends allowance drastically for this month :-) If we allow advertising it will be restricted to certain types of smaller banner ads (no flashy DHTML ads, pop-ups, pop-unders etc.).

I am currently looking at the stats and it looks like we have received around 1 million hits over the past month. This means that advertising on MyADSL should be a good option for many IT related companies.

Can you please give your views on the matter. Any feedback will be appreciated.

Regards,

RPM
[email protected]
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">1 million hits over the past month<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Jeepers.

<b><hr noshade size="1"></b><font size="2"><font color="red"><b>You can take Telkom out of the Post Office but you can't take the Post Office out of Telkom.</b></font id="red"></font id="size2">
 
Hi RPM. Advertising along the lines of the google advertising one sees around a lot would be fine by me - as long as it doesn't mean I have to read posts around adverts, I'm happy.
From my side, I'm a worker ant in a big corporate, so advertising isn't really an option. However I would still like to contribute to MyADSL on a subscription/sponsorship basis - no hard monthly fees, but simply an account to which I can transfer XX funds every so often. I'm sure many others are also not in a position to advertise, but would still like to contribute.
I don't regard sponsorships/subscriptions as charity by any means - MyADSL has provided me with so much information for so long that paying something back into the forum would be my pleasure.

As a side line, I think we have many professionals on the forum that have contacts within the hosting arena. Possibly we can ask forumites to hook MyADSL up with a better hosting deal. Also the opportunity for a hosting company to advertise on this forum could be offered to sweeten the hosting deal...use it, dont use it

<font color="blue">Telkom needs a leash, ICASA needs some guts, and the </font id="blue"><font color="red">SA consumer</font id="red"><font color="blue"> needs to make it happen</font id="blue">
 
...do whatever it takes... just dont let myadsl.co.za die. This is one of the most useful sites that I've ever found and had the satisfaction of finding solutions on.

A few ads wouldn't bother me (or any other users if they knew it was for the greater good of things...).

:)
 
I can recommend google adsense - pays regularly and most ads are pretty relevant to the content.
 
Long overdue i.m.h.o. . I fully support the kind of advertising rpm describes if it will help to sustain this site. But, like lewstherin, I'm a corporate pleb myself so can't justify an ad, but wouldn't mind making the odd once-off voluntary donation and I think it would only help if there was such an option to compliment the advertising.
 
I think you have the right idea RPM. You have my support whatever you decide.

Martin: maybe we should let Telkom advertise. Wouldn't it be ironic if they were paying for the upkeep of the site which would ultimately bring the almighty Telkom to their knees [:p]


----------------
United we stand!
----------------
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by VQuest</i>

Martin: maybe we should let Telkom advertise. Wouldn't it be ironic if they were paying for the upkeep of the site which would ultimately bring the almighty Telkom to their knees [:p]

<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

lol, never thought of it that way!
 
I support the ad route too. Subs might put off potential supporters. Maybe you can restrict the ads to the news/homepage? We would all see it, but wouldn't impact scrolling through the forum.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.
 
Ad's are the obvious long term solution, but in the short term, I would also be willing contribute to the R5000.00 bill. Lets have the account details.
RPM don't be shy we all owe you.

Cheers
Chris
 
You guys are missing the point, MyADSL prides itself on being a ad-free non-commited orginisation..once ads appear there will be a small case for opponents to argue that MyADSL is in favour of its recipient of adverts. This is no small issue we are dealing with, when we accept ads for cash we will be under scrutiny and will face oopisition that may use the ads as a clause for profit seeking andor conflict of intrest.

If we create a system of donations by members there must be no thank you gesture, no special icons and now way to tell in the forums that a member has or has not donated.

Basically guys this is not a simple question, but a major decision to be made.
 
Your argument has merit. Personally I dont have anything to advertise and would rather donate some cash, preferably anonomously and be done with it.

<b><hr noshade size="1"></b><font size="2"><font color="red"><b>You can take Telkom out of the Post Office but you can't take the Post Office out of Telkom.</b></font id="red"></font id="size2">
 
Hi guys

Thanks again for the support…you are indeed a refreshingly noble group of people.

My first concern is to move the site to a company where I don’t have to cover such a substantial unforeseen expense (the amount owed to Webonline is growing at over R 200-00 per day now). After this has been taken care of and I am certain the site will be stable for the foreseeable future I will look into advertising, donations etc. Although these financial and other issues are not particularly pleasant to deal with I still strongly believe in MyADSL’s ideals and would do my best to make certain that we remain on track and that we deliver the service users came to expect from us.

ASnogarD has many valid points and is definitely worth serious consideration. I could not foresee this unfortunate financial burden but will carry it if you guys feel it is best for the site and MyADSL as a whole. The final decision will, as always, will lie with the members of MyADSL.

Regards,

RPM
[email protected]
 
I agree with ASnogarD on this, the minute you bring in advertising it could open up a whole new set of issues.

rpm, I don't believe you should carry the financial burden alone as South Africa as a whole benefits immensely from this site. I have seen a few forums across the web face financial difficulties and you actually wouldn't believe the amount of support given by their members in time of need. I think the donation route would be the best route to go initially as then there is no obligation to anyone and MyADSL would still be seen as an open community rather than a business venture.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I think the donation route would be the best route to go initially as then there is no obligation to anyone<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Ditto.

<b><hr noshade size="1"></b><font size="2"><font color="red"><b>You can take Telkom out of the Post Office but you can't take the Post Office out of Telkom.</b></font id="red"></font id="size2">
 
RPM, post a request for better hosting solutions - maybe someone from the forum will come forward and help out. And while you at it post some account details so we can help you out with the immedidate forum costs...
ASnogarD you make good points, so the donation route would seem best.

<font color="blue">Telkom needs a leash, ICASA needs some guts, and the </font id="blue"><font color="red">SA consumer</font id="red"><font color="blue"> needs to make it happen</font id="blue">
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">the amount owed to Webonline is growing at over R 200-00 per day now<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

If Webonline refuse to provide logs of access and where its coming from I dont think its fair for them to charge you for that bandwidth usage.

Firstly one needs to know where such traffic is coming from (Local or international) and what requests are taking up the most (Is it the forum, or some speed test that is hosted?) and deal with the problem appropriatly before getting charged.

It's very easy for someone in the states or on a big line to just set a loop to constantly download the logo at the top of the page for example in turn resulting in huge bandwidth costs.

From one of our hosts:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">What if I get "slashdotted"?
"Slashdotting" refers to what happens when a very popular site posts a link to a smaller site, usually unexpectedly (named after a certain large, popular nerd news site). At an instant, hundreds of thousands of people are suddenly accessing pages on the smaller site, usually not a situation that the small site owner envisaged. This often overwhelms the resources of the smaller site, causing the site to become unavailable.

Hence the effect is exactly the same as for a denial-of-service attack, but the cause is different: Bytemark's network has 100Mb connection to most of the rest of the internet, so our routers will cope with the traffic. However if the pages on the site are not static HTML pages, but scripted, it is very easy to write an inefficient page which will (e.g.) open a database connection for every page fetch. Alternatively Apache's performance settings may not allow very many simultaneous connections.

We are always notified when our traffic spikes above normal usage, but <b>we can tell the difference between malicious traffic and a suddenly popular web site, and will do you the courtesy of letting you know of a potential excess bandwidth bill. </b>
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

http://www.bytemark-hosting.co.uk/tech/terms_attack.html

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett
 
Karnaugh, if you take time to read the other post relating to hosting, then you will see that webonline has provided access to the logs.

ps. There is no such thing as free or unlimited bandwidth is South Africa.
 
TheRabbi... i think in the early days it was easy for providers to say things like "unlimited bandwidth" because there was less traffic of the net as a whole (there must be stats somewhere) and smaller websites where never likely to use any large amount (gigs) of bandwidth... obviously things have changed a lot over time and statements like that are very unsafe nowadays...

...just my thoughts...
 
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