Part 2 : FreeURL and other plans

You are planning to revolutionize the URL redirection market with your outsourced FreeURL solution. Do you see this as a particularly strong growth area, and how are you going about differentiating your product from others?
Part of the problem with domain names, in particular dot com web addresses is that the market is saturated. The outsourced FreeURL solution offers an opportunity for domain owners to sub-lease sub domains from their DNS.

Sounds boring huh? A simple, clear and short memorable URL can serve as a permanent redirect to a more complex web address.

Okay, let's say you wanted to register Baseball.com as your website. (I haven't checked the domain name, but I bet it's gone!)

Now the customised FreeURL service can be leased by the owner of Ball.com to generate sub domains; they could now instantly set-up Base.Ball.com, Foot.Ball.com, www.Ball.com/Sports, www1.Ball.com and so on - these would serve as cloaked redirects to a more obscure domain name such as www.geocities.com/baseball/dir/your223/index.html.

The permutations are endless and there are thousands of popular unused words and attractive domains that personal and commercial sites would love to use. With regards to differentiating - I don't know of another service that can achieve this or configure a URL as flexibly and in as controlled a manner as FreeURL does.

My only problem is investment and marketing as so much of my finances have been put into getting to this stage that very little is left.

I saw a big need for this service, realizing that for every "good" domain being used there are 99 not being used, whose owners can't develop, but need an automated service that can make them money from their purchases. Selling domain names is a very hard business and I can now giggle at those who pay thousand of dollars each year just to renew their dormant domains. FreeURL will offer a solution to profit from such domains - and if anyone can also share this vision and has the finances to support the growth of this project, speak now or forever hold your peace!

You currently work alone, doing everything from graphics through programming to web promotion. Does managing all the tasks associated with keeping so many sites up and running simultaneously bring special problems? Have you ever considered outsourcing or hiring staff?
I work alone not through choice but through circumstance. In order to achieve so much, I've had to spend 2 years out from full-time employment to get to this stage of development and that's a commitment and risk that very few would have the courage to take. Ask yourself if you would or could take that risk!

Because of that financial commitment, it leaves very little left to contemplate hiring staff. Managing the sites is pretty easy because of the automation - the main problems are social ones, and in particular the lack of time to spend with my current girlfriend.

I'm sorry about that. My last love left me due to lack of attention and I was absolutely devastated; I lost 3 months of my life there, and perhaps more. That was a very sad emotional time indeed that I never want to experience again, one that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. The lesson here is to strike a balance in your life as you only live once, and life is short. I should listen to my own advice and act upon it, but yet again my circumstances dictate that I must work all through the night. Carpe Diem - seize the day.

What web hosting solution do you use, and why? What kind of traffic do your sites generate a month, and how fast is your traffic growing? Can your current hosting solution handle your future traffic, or are you going to have to look elsewhere?
I have hosted continually with Web 2010 in Florida USA because they offered the best hosting package at the time and are very well established.

Since then I've grown to know the technical support guys very well and despite the 4,000+ mile difference and 5 hour time-zone gap between server and home, I couldn't be more reassured that things are the best they can be. Their location is also ideal on the East Coast of the USA as most of my traffic - and Internet traffic in general - is USA based. They have just gone to 24-hour support, which is great for me, and have plenty of scope for offering scalable hardware solutions.

I've no comment on the traffic through-put other than it's pretty good given that I have a number of different "sticky" sites active, they are self generating and expand exponentially over time.

In order to boost that traffic I will be looking to set-up decent advertising campaigns and more importantly strike a deal with a major ISP or web hosting company but a number of milestones need to be achieved first before that can happen. Ramping up development and presence needs to be a balanced process.

Looking back at your sites' development, how would you have gone about things differently? Did you take any decisions you now regret?
Not really... I guess that's where experience counts for a lot. I found that to be able to understand and achieve the kind of mind-blowing stuff that I can do today, time has to be "wasted" on learning and experimenting no matter how smart you think you are. I spent 2 months learning HTML inside out, 3 months learning JavaScript and so on - there's only one way to be good at something, and that's the old fashioned way of getting on with it! Today, there's very little I think I can't achieve, but that story was completely different 12 months ago.

You tend to go for fairly conservative, fast-loading site designs. What's your thinking behind this approach?
Hmm. I've spent years as a professional 3D Artist building extravagant complex models and scenery and have had countless daily ear bashings on frame rate and optimizations. I'm one of the very few that slowed down Silicon Graphics' Onyx when it first came out! The same is true of the Internet, bandwidth is still a major issue and so long as that problem exists you must adapt to it. I'd love to go away and design a Michaelangelo of a web site but that would take forever and only be a one-off WOW factor site - why would people revisit to see the same old thing? Visitors want fast, useful and fresh content. The choice is made for me.

Continued...