the main hassle was those damn dinosaurs. T-rex was the worse, they ate everything that moved. and the brontosaurus, and stegosaurus, and triceratops, man it was dangerous just logging on. :1orglaugh

I'm going to answer this question from my experience. Daily I have new people telling me how much money they aren't making yet how much money they are paying thier hosting companies. I have a list of questions I ask them.

The list is this:

1. How many gig's did you use last month?

2. Can I see your stats?

3. Do you have an .htaccess file on your site?

This is old school basics that many of the so called unix guru's setup first. Yet 90% of the people I ask these questions to cannot get by the first question never mind the rest.

And 99.9% of the people doesn't know the answer to all three. It's simple business practices people if you can't answer all three of these questions you need to be learning something.

When a brick and mortar company closes for the night doesn't the owner lock the doors behind him ?

If you answered yes to this then why doesn't your site have a lock in the form of a .htaccess file to keep your merchandise from being ripped off. Before you start any business the locks should always be in place first.

Bandwidth ... I talked to three people today about bandwidth. None of them could tell me even approximately what they were using. Yet they are paying the bill to their ISP. Before I pay my hosting bill I want to know what I used and what I'm being charged for. Just like when I go into wal-mart I want a recieot so I know what they charged me for and that I actually got what I was charged for.

Now maybe you don't need to be a unix god to figure all this out. But by god you better have an understanding of it at least or your going to get ripped off big time and it will be your own fault.

Meta Tags, Keywords, SE Optimization, IP address blocking, If you don't know these basics your throwing good Search Engine traffic right out the window.

Why do webmasters have servers on different networks with different hosts? They know search engine optimization thats why. It's not about putting all your money in one place it's about putting all your ip addresses in one place also.

Ok enough of my ranting. But if you understood what I just wrote chances are your making money. If not .... Your wondering why your not making money ... and this is all before the design starts.

:2 cents:

Not as many newbs.

It was glorious.

Back in the days like maby 3 years back I made like 1000$ on 3K daily to a site a month.

No I make the same on a 40K...

Go figure ;)

jfpdude, yeah that's true, i've been dealing with colos for a long time so i understand traffic management etc and i guess the average newb doesn't know how to do stuff like limit the amount of bandwidth he can max out at on his interface, parse apache logs, etc. its also startling what people will pay for scripts, "dedicated servers" with minimal amounts of bandwidth, yadda yadda, but none of that helps you GET the traffic, build relationships, make the best out of saturated sponsors, content, and bored picky increasingly paranoid surfers. it seems to me someone with a unix background has basically the same learning curve as anyone else.

Ha ha ha, they got me to. I remember thinking that I was gonna get in some nice checks, only to find that they screwed me good, ha ha ha. Gold Rush was another place that fucked me, they paid good for a while, then like a switch was hit, they went sour.

Wow, I just think of the good ole days, it's close to 8 years since I opened up my first bikini page on Angelfire.com, ha ha ha.

I wish that things were as profitable as they used to be a couple of years ago :(

I worked for them briefly. Before that, I put their banners up, and they were paying anywhere from $.06 to $.13!!! per click-through. Of course, they were doing it by shaving and by nasty credit card tricks, but what the hey!

I sold BBS memberships for $20/year on a 2400 v.42bis modem ;)

When I was a freshman in college my buddy was making $1 per click to a software company from his porn site... I have no idea where that guy is now -- it was Fletcher Island I think -- at UF. What a dumpy dorm that was -- the only dorm on campus w/ internet access and it was a shithole w/ toothless girls...

I hear my buddies... and 3 years ago we all thought we were going to be ROLLING in money TODAY! We all expected the obvious MORE PEOPLE ONLINE = MORE MONEY! What the fuck happened? Christ when we we giving the rest of the world a credit card?!

I remember when business 2.0 came out -- they were charting internet growth -- I was sure I'd have at least 3x profits in 2002 according to their predictions...

I blame it all on the fucking credit card companies... I'm going to have to try some non-adult stuff...

Fucking A.

hehe nice story

Some memories:

Used to be able submit pages to infoseek and they were indexed real-time.

Used to know an employee code to submit sites to yahoo. Had the number one searches for sex and fuck on Yahoo! for years. Over $100k/year income from one listing to a free site with 20 pics that was hardly ever updated.

Domains were more expensive so there was less competition in the search engines. Once had the top 40 searches in excite for "sex".

Started a top 50 site and was doing over 100k visitors/day within a week on board hype alone.

Ahhhh, the good old days, when snow was the king on GFY (in his own mind),
AMP was telling us stories about his previous life in the Gulf War, Hungryman hadnt started ripping of other webmasters yet..... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand GFY was girl free..... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah the good old times..

Back in da dayz.. bandwidth was a lot more expensive if you paid for it. Otherwise you had a bunch of free hosts who did not worry as much about the TOS as today where you post a nice pic, get some decent hits, and they close you down in an hour.

You had a bunch of those pay per click scams where they all promised to pay you .02-05ct a click, and never did.

If you had relevant content, you actually got a good page listing on the search engines, and it wasn't unheard of to be on the first page or two w/o much effort.

Tech support for a number of things was fairly nonexistant depending on what it was.

You had a bunch of complete crap sites littering the net. So if you looked for something, you'd find 100's of sites that looked like they were done by 12 year olds.

You could actually FIND something on a search engine w/o having to do advance searchs, useing "'s, and all the rest.

You made money hand over fist if you had a good site, good content, and traffic as you were in a small pond, versus the ocean of sharks like today.

You did not have conglomertes running everything, like today. Most were fairly small, independants.

Those are some I can think of off the top of my head, but I am sure there are plenty more. There have been a lot of changes since '96 when I started my first site, which nothing more than a whoo hoo I can do html. But now you have a deep ocean of 'companies' versus individuals.

:pimp

Even better was when they went multi-node and you could see what the people on the other nodes were downloading. I learned WAY too much about my high school friends that way.

Oh Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeez ... I remember when I had to push porn both ways uphill ...
Everyone was a pioneer
Less competition
Less laws
More profit
Stunned members
Credit card companies did not care
Circle Jerks (ew) created some good alliances, as well some bad.

and ASCII porn ... what kind of twisted imagination you'd need to 'enjoy' that? (You, back in to your rubber room, NOW!)

edit: oh yah, and idiots (oops, good customers) always sent cash via letter-mail.

Damn, this thread was started IN the early days to some posters :)

good one ;-)

http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/hottop...ernet-bday.jpg

GFY...the early years..

All we had to do was to take a few pictures of my wife and make a shity tour and post to TGP sites and link list and we were pullng down some pretty big bucks in the old days.

When I began (in 1994) we had one registrar, Internic, and the cost was $100 for 2 years. I found an old invoice from 1996 when I had to renew again and it was $100 for another 2 years.

Bandwidth was $12.50 a gig.

Many sites were made from Usenet content.

My first sponsor disappeared owing me money (funny to say they are now one of the largest programs there is).

They were fun... but we thought the sky was falling back then, too. :winkwink:

:glugglug