Last night I put my webmaster forum for sale on the buy/sell section at webcosmoforums.com and few others. Most of the readers at my forum immediately realized its a April Fools joke. People are indeed smart at my foum for sure.

At other forums only one person realized it was a joke. Then I got quite a few PMs asking for more information; some people offering a price as well. It was fun to see how much people think the forum might sell for. Highest price offer I got was $300.

I think there were several lessons to learn from this for me:

• It let me somewhat see how much my forum was worth to them. I wasn’t happy with the prices offered of course.
• Showed me how much people would be interested in the forum. That actually signifies the marketing aspect of the forum, if it has a market value at all.
• It shows me there are lot more work to be done to have a selling value that would make me happy. But for a 11 month old forum it wasn’t that bad, considering there are tons of forums being sold for less then $100.

Last two months incomes been down by 40%! One of the factors effected my income is change of hosting for my best earning site; it caused the site not working properly for about a month. Then bad economy added up.

How do you survive in bad economy? After giving some thought I went for the basics, cut down expenses. I minimized the marketing for sites that earn less. Then I have some employees I had to let go. Now I am earning close the expenses, although I am still covering some costs from my own pocket. Its time for duck now waiting to get things better.

After doing lot of research, I settled for hostGator “basic windows dedicated hosting”. It seemed to be the best package considering the price and server specs.  This is the sequence of events that happened during my HostGator dedicated hosting time:

• They took about 2 days to build the server. Thats pretty standard. Although I have seen some companies do it in less then a day.
• They gave me the Plesk Control Panel as part of the package. But problem is if I don’t do an action through the plesk control panel, it would not take effect. For example if I create a website using IIS manager, it would not work.
• I got the site running on the server. And I realized the SQL Express database is not enough to handle the load. The site started crashing very often.
• I wanted to solve the canonical issue making sure that all urls without www are 301 redirected to the www version. I tried to do that through IIS manager, and it didn’t work. So I created a ticket asking for help. After an hour when I checked my site and I see its down. I asked the tech support whats going on. They got the site back on fixing the problem. Then I found the emails are not working. So I updated the ticket with the problem. And I got about 4 hours of downtime of the site while they fix the problem.
• The long downtime because of the canonical issue got me somewhat mad, mainly because they have not asked my permission before putting my site down. This is totally unprofessional.
• I called the customer service to complain about the issue. The customer service person tells me I can’t complain, but if I have any problem I can email to an email he gave me.
• I moved my site to a server with another company.

Lets say you started a website with high hopes and also you have spent good deal of money on it. How you gonna react if it fails?

Thinking of how does people react when they fail on something it could be one of many:

• Really angry, wanna kill the person if any caused it.
• I don’t care attitude.
• I am sad but I will try again.
• …………etc

As initial wave of emotion, I would get sad. Then I would start thinking what I have done wrong, also I would start thinking over how I can overcome them. In cases I would speak to like minded people. Then these emotions would be followed by cold mad with more determination and hard work. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should not quit something that isn’t working; we should. But if we see that we can get something working better fixing the problems, it certainly deserve a chance.

So I decided to use WordPress now. We have moved most of the blog entries. Unfortunately we can’t transfer any of the comments; apologies from me. We still have the blog as DOFOLLOW. Some posts are not moved intentionally.

The new theme is very neutral looking. I personally love it. Hope you folks would like it as well.

One big change would be, I will be posting stuffs on what I do for my business. Plus there would be other categories as usual. One category “funny/weird news” is dropped; new posts that fall on that category would go to General category.

This new blog name is DailyGlobal.com. Its about news on entertainment, health, politics, and much more.

Unlike this blog, I have decided to use a wordpress blog software this time. To be honest wordpress is kind of confusing in cases if you wanna go beyond the basics. I even found a bug. But its still cool, once I took some time to get used to things started falling in peices.

Check out the new blog http://www.dailyglobal.com/

__________________________________________________ ________

Top Poster Prize:
Baby Plan from hostGator.com
Linux hosting
Disk Space 600GB, Bandwidth 6000GB, CPanel, 1 Domain, Unlimited FTP,
Site builder, Unlimited email accounts, Unlimited MySql, PHP, 99.9% Uptime guarantee and more.

Second Top Poster Prize:
Hatchling Plan from hostGator.com
Linux hosting
Disk Space 350GB, Bandwidth 3000GB, CPanel, 1 Domain, Unlimited FTP,
Site builder, Unlimited email accounts, Unlimited MySql, PHP, 99.9% Uptime guarantee and more.
__________________________________________________ _______
This is How it Works(rules):
- All you have to do is post on the forum http://www.WebCosmoForums.com. You can make relevant posts in
any categories you like.
- This contest is open for existing and new members all. If you don’t have an account, register an account.
- New threads, answering others all counts.
- Each new thread post worths 2 points. Each answers worth 1 point.
- All posts must be meaningful. Yes, no, good, bad, nice post these type
of short answers would not be counted.
- Starts May 20, 2008 12AM GMT
- Ends June 19, 2008 12PM GMT.
- Winners will be declared June 21, 2008.
- We would pay only for the hosting plans. Hosting accounts would be registered under your name. We are not responsible for any succeeding renewals.
- Minimum 150 posts (threads and posts any) during the contest period.
- Prizes are not exchangeable for money or anything else. Only the prizes described above will be given to the winners.
- One account per person.

Here is the contest thread: http://www.webcosmoforums.com/showthread.php?t=580

Url http://www.webcosmoForums.com

So what is WebCosmo Forums about?

WebCosmo forums is a community and webmaster discussion board. People can talk on community based topics like women, jobs, politics etc. Webmasters got the majority of categories ranging from marketing, SEO, coding etc.

Why another forum?

You may know I have another site webcosmo.com which is a classified ads site. It seemed to be a standard having a discussion board along with a classified ads site. So I had to go for it.

You can earn money posting on the forum

I am planning to share the revenue with the forum visitors. Revenue sharing will be effective from 17 Feb 2008, if I can finish the coding by then. If you have a Google AdSense account you would be able to participate in the program.

Join and Post

Don’t shy away from the forum because its empty. It will get filled over time. I would request you sign up and start posting. Happy forumming.

How this help your ads? As you subscribe to the webcosmo.com feeds news aggregators
could make them public (if you choose) making it available for other interested people
to view. Feeds work like spreading the words for you.

Subscribe to newsreader feed buttons are available at the bottom of the search page
for each category and sub-category.

This will help you save ads that you like to keep track of.

To remove a listing from your favorites, click on “Remove” for the corresponding listing.

A listing will be automatically deleted from the favorites after it has been removed from the site.

A “Add to Favorite” link has been added to all listing details page.

Also we have slightly changed the details page moving the “Email to friend” link on top of the description.