As you may or may not have noticed, yesterday smrsimple went down for three hours. This has prompted me to consider switching hosts. We have one year left prepaid on our current host so the switch will not be immediate.
Part of my plan to keep smrsimple running for another 5+ years is to have smrsimple run cash flow positive. This way in X years when traffic has decreased and the ads no longer cover the hosting cost we'll have savings to cover the gap.
Google forbids me from talking much about the ads, but I can say that right now the ads bring in a little bit more than hosting costs. The sums are all very modest, below the cost of a McDonalds meal.
Once the savings run out I'll cover smrsimple's hosting costs myself. I may be a poor student but I'm not that poor.
The issue is that if we do switch hosts then costs would go up and ads would not longer cover hosting. As such I am going to run an experiment with Amazon affiliate links.
An Amazon affiliate link is a link to a product on amazon. If someone clicks this link and then buys a product on amazon then amazon pays smrsimple a tiny amount of money (4%). Thus these links are like ads. I am hesitant to add more ads to the site, in fact in the past few months I've even removed one set of ads. So I will only add these affiliate links in two places, here, and a "Buy SMR" page.
So here is the sales pitch: If you happen to be buying something on the American Amazon site then please first click this link: http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&c ... sraisim-20
If you do that then amazon will pay smrsimple 4%. It will not increase the price of the goods you are buying. Thus it is a donation that costs you nothing.
My hope is that this will bring in enough to cover the increase in hosting costs so that we can move to a more reliable host.
