Part 2 : Affiliate programs and technology

Have you tried other alternatives to advertising, like affiliate programs, and have these been successful?
I tried a program with Reel.com to sell the video "Slapshot". However in the 6 months and tens of thousands of banners (and close to a thousand clickthroughs) I only generated $3 in sales, and about 1/2 of that was from items I bought myself.

There are many problems with affiliate programs. The items sold are usually so inexpensive that it takes hundreds of sales a month to get enough money to even see a check. Most of the affiliates pay quarterly. And you have to trust that they are reporting your sales properly - I've heard stories of many sales getting "lost".

Add to that the people who see the ad on your site but don't use your affiliate code - you don't get paid for those. So the benefits are too heavily stacked for the advertisers. They can work in very limited circumstances, but they are generally not a good way to make money.

Such an extensive database needs good programming and hosting. What solution have you used for site hosting and database management?
All my data is stored on my PC using a database application called Magic. It is a GUI language that allows me to quickly develop applications for data entry - much faster and error-free than VB or any other traditional language.

I then export the data in 2 ways - one by generating static HTML pages on my PC and then uploading them to my server, and the other by generating data files which I then load into a mySQL database.

I find that the combination of static and dynamic pages works well - the static pages are picked up by search engines and also reduce load on the database (especially since they are more complex to generate) and the dynamic pages allow specialized searches.

I use PHP to generate the dynamic pages with a little bit of perl thrown in too.

The trick is to keep the page sizes down, because that keeps your costs down and speeds up the site.

Have you had any problems with hosting services and what are the things you looked for when you chose your present host?
I had a horrible experience with Alabanza. Even though I had a contract with them that stipulated no transfer fees, they "sold my site" to a subsidiary who then implemented transfer fees without notifying me first. Luckily I saw that coming and was able to find another host just as they shut me down for exceeding my quota.

My current host is pair.com. I chose them because they have a suite of hosting plans that moves sites from virtual servers to dedicated servers. Most companies start you on a virtual plan for $20 a month, and when you hit a certain level of traffic they tell you that you need to get a $500/month dedicated server. The level where they tell you this is artificially low and the dedicated server is overkill.

Those virtual server and dedicated server plans are the two big money makers for the hosting companies - they don't make as much on a plan that falls in the middle of the two, so most don't offer them. But going from $20/month to $500/month is a steep jump, too steep for most sites.

Looking back, would you have gone about things any differently - what are the mistakes to avoid when building a popular website?
Well, my major mistake was building my site on a virtual host instead of getting my own domain. That was back when domains were $100/year, and I couldn't justify that at the time - the site was small, and had few visitors. But as I grew, people linked to the virtual host, so when I moved servers last February, even though I had been operating as hockeydb.com for years, many links still pointed to the old server. I lost a lot of traffic in the move.

And a final question - how will the Falcons do next season?
With Wayne Gretzky as part-owner of the Coyotes, I think they will recruit some talented players that they can send down to help us out. And who knows, maybe the Great One will pay a visit to Springfield.