Hi, I know many of you are shelling out lots of money for a dedicated host/colo and I was wondering how you fund your website expenses. Obviously most of you run businesses and generate revenue online through sales. But Im sure some of you don't really sell anything, for example a popular forum or some other site. I want to start a site that I know will receive many hits and a dedicated server would be what I need. But how do I subsidize the cost?

I guess I am asking if anyone has some good ideas, like advertising companies that are reputable, or a less annoying(to the users) method of generating revenue. Do banner/pop up advertising companies really pay?

Thanks for your time and sorry if this is kinda OT. I also know ads are the devil but hey, if its the difference between me being able to have the site at all, well I will choose advertising + cool site over nothing at all. And please, if you know of non-advertising methods to generate revenue, let me know.

-Eric

This sounds like what I'm doing right now. It's not easy to pay for server costs off of just advertising right now. It might be easier if you could really target the ads to webhosting or similar, but for most websites it's a more general audience. I have 2 servers, and run the Racerplanet Network, which is like it sounds, a bunch of websites about racing games. I get over 1 million adviews a month right now and you don't want to know how much bandwidth I use.

The best ad company I've found so far is adtegrity.com and I've been very happy with them, I've dealt with a few others as well. I'm doing good if I can break even money wise, let's just say it's not been happening for a good while. If this month stays on track though I might actually get out of the red though. I'm always looking for other advertisers or ways to make money, nothing surefire has presented itself though.

If your website is going to be expensive to support, perhaps you should work on a way to make it self-sufficient or even profitable.

You say your site is going to be active enough to require a dedicated server, can you think of any ways to turn all that activity into money?

I find the best way of funding these sorts of websites is to have use affiliate programmes targeted at your audience, these usually pay off far better then normal adverts.

For example for the person who runs the racing game website they could find a games website with an affiliate scheme.

I will be setting up a website for a specific game. Not much chance for sales other than pre-ordering it with an amazon.com affiliate account. Thanks for the adtegrity tip I will check them out.

Any other ideas?

Two words :) Sponsored Hosting.

:D