So I've already spent 48 hours playing Terraria, which is pretty crazy considering how busy I've been and how few days its been. Anyway, Best Buy is doing a sale now and since its a physical store I was able to take part in it! I ended up getting Steel Diver (a a meh 3DS game) and Sin & Punishment (a great wii game) for $5 each. Theres a couple more I was interested in, but I gotta save what little money I have for more important things =p
Hosting Costs (feel free to TLDR this middle section)I've been working on my websites a lot recently, adding important new features and trying to make things more efficient. Lately I've noticed that my server is often being "throttled down." I've been trying to make my code faster, but I've come to the conclusion that my code has nothing to do with it. The throttling happens at seemingly random times, with little connection to my sites activity. So its probably other websites on the shared server using up too much power. Also, every once in a while I will have a mysql query that normally takes a fraction of a second require 2-4 seconds. Luckily 99% of the time the throttling isn't noticeable, but its still annoying because it makes it hard to tell how efficient my code is. I've been able to look into mysql usage statistics and while I'm 2nd highest for number of individual connections (due to my shoutbox, most likely, it doesn't use much power but it pings the server every few seconds). I'm much lower in the list for cpu usage and "busy time" than most of the top 20 so I don't think my code is the problem.I've been looking into upgrading my hosting account, but I'm very hesitant to switch hosts at this point in time and the upgrade options for bluehost are rather vague. I can spend twice as much and get a "reseller" account, but they don't have any way to compare the reseller hosting to the basic hosting. All I can do is compare a couple features to the other reseller accounts. I assume it would have to be better, but without a comparison I have no idea if its worth the cost.They also have a pro hosting package that would be like $35 a month, it would have some important extras like dedicated ip and an ssl certificate, but once again theres no comparison of the hosting packages and recently they redesigned the site and removed the sentence that said pro hosting was faster.I'm not making enough ad money to pull in a profit even at the current prices, partially because of my power limitations, but its hard to justify upgrading at all if I can't even make enough money to pay for it =/ It doesn't help that you have to buy 6-12 months at a time to get reasonable pricing.So for money making I've been thinking about what I've worked on that could be sold without having to upgrade my hosting first, my big projects like PycoForums are too intensive and incomplete to be monetized on the current host. But I think maybe theres some potential for CheeseMod. I was thinking about offering a "web integration" feature where you pay maybe a dollar or two a month and get your own server shoutbox (I've integrated the chat so you can talk back and forth and even use commands) and activity page (like http://pycosites.com/cheesemod/?cmd=gff) I'm not really sure how many of those I could handle on the current host, if anybody even wanted one.So anywayDo you guys have any ideas on how I can make money from CheeseMod? I like working on it, but nobody has donated yet and working on it is basically a part time job. I wont be abandoning CheeseMod at all, but non-essential updates will likely slow down as I stop spending 15 hours on it a week =pI don't want to do anything stupid like ingame benefits for donating because that just feels cheap. Maybe theres some more website based features I could do? Or maybe a better way to get donations than just having a button? I was thinking about setting up a CheeseMod community website, but thats a large project and I'm trying to think small right now.I'm not throwing all my hope behind CheeseMod. I've got other website projects, but it would be much easier to work on them if I could get some money coming in first.
If you don't mind putting advertisements up, you could use adfly for the download link to cheesemod.
Every download generates revenue.Hmm that is interesting, I'll keep it in mind for when CheeseMod starts pulling in more downloads.
I like that it gives you stats for every link. I love the fact that you can change where the adfly link points to without hassle as well. That's incredibly useful if you want to update something, and you can't use the same URL.
I use adfly for the download to my texture pack. Not many people download it anymore. Noticeably after I lost the hosting I had for my site.Another upside (for me) is that they send the money directly to your paypal account.Ah. Starting to want some profit off of your hard website work now too? haha. I've been thinking about that as well.
For cheesemod? Best thing would do the work of advertising, put an adfly link, and put a donation button (which will only get you a small amount most likely). But it was good experience and should go on a resume for the number of downloads it gets!You don't take donations in the form of traded Steam games, do you?
Because that is one way to make "money".I'd never say no to a free game, but the point of this blog was more to make money for non-game purposes =p
I actually do have a donation button on the cheesemod site, its just that most of the people willing to donate are too young to have paypal =/Best Buy sale? I wonder if I could get a discount on the GeForce 560 Ti at my local store. What is this all about?
I think its mostly just games and console accessories
http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=325378Also if you live near a half price books they are doing a sale today->sunday and they usually have some nicely priced, if a bit old, games/consoles. The one near me actually had a ps2 slim for $35 and wii for $75, would have been very tempting with the 40% off coupon if I didn't already own them =phttp://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=325294Have you thought about selling Cheesemod? (Can you sell mincraft mods legally?)
Or maybe starting a very cheap subscription service for all future mod updates after you reach a stable build state you're comfortable with.Thank you so much =D
As for selling/subscriptionizing CheeseMod, I don't think it would work well. I think most people would rather use the other more popular mods for free, even if they did need dozens of mods to recreate all of CheeseMods features =p At best I could hope to add a few premium features like the shoutbox thing, but they'd have to be unique or people would just get a competing mod instead. It would probably just encourage other mod makers to recreate whatever feature I was selling. I guess my biggest problem is that I got into modding too late, if I had started a year earlier I could have built a name for myself without having to compete with all these established mods.