The Cost of Internetting

Posted by admin on Mar 21st, 2011 | View Comments

I paid a couple website related bills today and it got me thinking about how much all this costs – it was more than I thought.

Today while at the gym, I was thinking of all the random bills I had to pay that all seemed to be due at the same time. This included things like my car insurance, a recent doctor visit bill, the final payment on my credit card bill, some domain name renewals, and the hosting package for my podcast. I cringed as I paid all of them. However, I got to thinking a bit about how much having a website costs me personally and what I get in return from it. A reasonable person, especially in this economy, would look at the numbers and make cuts as needed.

So the facts:

I own 25 domains from various sites over the years. These include midwestpodcast.com (which was podcast convention that never got off the ground), adamantinearts.org (my old non-profit that closed a few years ago),  as well as a handful of domains I am managing for other people… free of charge apparently. This list also includes the important ones I am using for projects or will be using shortly. Given Godaddy charges around $11 per domain name, I have $275 per year in domain name fees.

I have Dreamhost hosting for my podcast, Krapp’s Last Cast. I use this mainly for their unlimited bandwidth, although, we have been on a year plus hiatus so the bandwidth usage is minimal now. However, we’re planning on starting again soon as well as launching a new podcast strictly for Dim Media. This costs me $7 per month (by paying for 3 years in advance). This costs me $84 per year.

I have Linode hosting for all my other other non-GAE projects. I use this to run the Dim Media site, this site, as well as a handful of other blogs for others. This is also, the cdn for one of my upcoming projects. I kinda need this. However, it is pricey and costs $330 per year.

So, that brings us to $689 annually to run all these sites.

Now, I make just less than $100 per year on Google ads – mostly from domain parking interestingly enough. The site that has the most non-monetary return is probably the Dim Media site. We refer a lot of our potential buyers to it and do a lot of marketing through it for our events. It is far harder to gauge if the money spent is made up for in the returns. However, Dim is its own business anyway, so it might be unfair to include it. Otherwise, it appears that I am in the whole nearly $600 per year in internet costs. Yikes.

I think my goal this year is to make that number at least break even through a combination of cutting out some things and trying to monetize more.