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Originally Posted by shima
Back in 1996-1997 it was relatively easy to spam SEs like Excite and Lycos to get like 30,000 hits to your pages.. I'm not saying that for a fact, but I heard some success stories  |
Not exactly true... but close. It was called the Gold Rush Years.
However we had a different set of problems. Good hosting was EXPENSIVE. I remember some ISP's had bandwidth overage charges of $1 per meg which is over $1,000 per gig.
There were hosting providers promising unlimited bandwidth, but when you would put them to the test with lots of traffic they either shut down your site or throttled your site back so it crawled at a snails pace. I went through at least 10 hosting companies my first year because none of them could deliver what they promised.
I had to pay $2,000 - $3,000 per month for hosting that today would cost $50.
Then you had crooked sponsors that would set up fly-by-night programs and never pay. Since these new sponsors paid monthly and even then several weeks after the month's end, by the time everyone was clued in you had lost thousands of dollars. We didn't have GFY to help us out but we did have the GBU list (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly), but I still got screwed by sponsors on the Good list.
You have to remember that this was all new stuff. We had to invest thousands of dollars for several months before seeing a dime of return. Most of us thought the feds would shut us down anyday and we would lose everything. Now you can get a simple site up for under $100 (domain and hosting cost) with a decent adult host and get a check from a sponsor within a couple of weeks.
Now don't get me started on the problems in the BBS days....