Tell me about having your own website?

I've never had a website before.

However, if YOU were planning to set up a website, on the basis that you know in advance that the incoming traffic is going to be high - ie a lot of people coming to your site and then linking off it to somewhere else (ie routing);

How would you go about this?

I understand that people visiting your site eats your bandwidth and you have to pay for it. However, does very high bandwidth work in your favour - ie, does the webhost who you are using like the fact that your site may take huge traffic - do you get special deals? Or is having huge traffic a pain in the ass that you have to pay for through the nose?

I'm kind of fishing for the fact that a site with a lot of traffic works in your favour - the webhost somehow gains from the traffic and cuts you slack for bringing in tons of traffic - baring in mind I don't know anything about setting up websites.

Here's a good question too.

Some sites carry adverts for major companies - do they strike their own deals with those companies or does the webhost do it automatically?

For example, if your site is gaining more and more traffic, does the webhost automatically set you up with bigger and better advertisers on your site or is this something you have to do yourself?

Also, are you allowed to host non-negotiated adverts?

Example, you could go to a site like www.majorgeeks.com

On the top of their page is an advert link to Crucial Technology.

Can you just put that link in your page (basically, a free advert link for Crucial Technology). I mean, seriously, would a company you advertise really mind that you are carrying links to them for free or is this not allowed?

EDIT:
If you do this - can the other site (ie Crucial) see that the refferals (so to speak) are coming from your site?

I'm in the UK - am I allowed to use foreign-based webhosts whereby the currency difference means I am getting it cheap as hell compared to my native currency?

Also, if you go down that route, can you dodge the legal system in your own country (not that I want to, but there may be benefits that I don't know about) or cons in the fact that you come under the law in the other country?

Technically, the ad would be copyrighted by the company that made/owned it, and they can either allow you to show it or deny it. Realistically, they are very unlikely to complain if you show their ad, unless they have objections to the content of your site and wished to not be associated with it.

So... legally they can prohibit you from showing it. Realistically, they are unlikely to have any objections.



Yes, they can. A browser will by default send a referrer URL along with a request for a page and/or image from another host. By default, the referrer is logged by most webserver software, meaning they have the ability to generate reports out of their logfiles showing referrers. Many commercial companies will do so, since it helps them analyze where their traffic comes from, and can help them to better target advertisements in the future.

So, is their money to be made from just doing this and hoping they eventually contact you and say 'Hey, we never paid you to advertise us'?

Is this a way to get noticed, by just doing it all for free - baring in mind I assume the cost to put a link on your page doesn't cost you anything?

I mean, is there money to be made to do this for big companies that nobody else normally links to?

Unless the webhost in question has a direct benefit (such as mandatory server-imposed ads for their company on your site, most hosting providers would prefer low-bandwidth customers. After all, the overwhelming majority of visitors has no idea what company would host the site in question, so they have little to benefit from huge amounts of traffic.

Exceptions are the mandatory banner ads, or sponsership deals where the company is publically mentioned on the site in question.

Almost every hsoting company has an allowed bandwidth allotment that is included with your hosting package. Exceed that, and you may be shut down for the rest of the month, or have the option to pay extra for the additional bandwidth. These days, you can find very competitive hosting packages that may allow you a few hundred gigabytes of traffic a month.

Be a bit leary of companies offering 'unlimited' bandwidth, since they tend to either actively shape your download speeds, or simply don't have a very big pipe to the internet in the first place... They're not in business out of the kindness of their hearts, after all, they still try to make a profit on the deal and bandwidth isn't free.



Of course. especially if you pay by creditcard, you can pretty much any hosting company on the planet willing to host it for you. However, I would strongly advise you stick with the better known companies in that case, because it would involve sending your creditcard info to strangers on the other side of the world.

If you want a .com, .net, .org etc. address it will be a piece of cake. If you want a .UK address, you may be a little more limited in your options, since not every non-UK hosting company will be able to register a .UK domain on your behalf.

Oh, clarification here - I don't need download speeds - the whole point of this is to route people elsewhere.

I am purely talking about a site that people come to then link off to the target site.

Does this mean my bandwidth will be tiny or do you still get stung with a statutory 'hit fee'.

I am just sucking people off the net and sending them on their way - with the intention of gaining massive traffic.

I seriously doubt it. After all, they never commissioned your advertising campaign, so why would they volunteer to start paying for it? Unless your site becomes very well known and they are hoping to score some brownie points with the general public by offering you free stuff, don't expect anything.

Also, keep in mind that the going rates for banner ads and such is next to nothing. We're talking fractions of a penny here.

A far more realistic way of doing this is signing up for google adwords or something, where you can specify what kind of site you have, and they will give you a piece of code to insert in your page and it will automatically show a block with relevant (text) ads on your page. The advertisers pay google for exposure, and google pays you for showing the ads on your page.
(Not sure if you only get payed when someone clicks, or also when they 'just' see them)

You cannot specify that you only want ads from a certain company, but you can specify categories so you only get 'computer related' ads for example.



There is pretty much no (Extra) cost involved whatever you put on your site in question, other than the time/efforts involved to edit the page itself, so that's right.



In this day and age, and 'big company' that takes the internet remotely seriously already has their own online advertising policies and contracts. The only way you, as an independent, are likely to break into something like this are to have your own website that gets a large number of views a day, is in reasonably good standing, and has something solid to offer.

If you can knock on their door and say "Hi, I'm puki, owner of pukisamazing.com, which gets 200,000 unique views a day. Great advertising rates available", they very well might be interested... But I don't think it's realistic for them to 'notice' you giving them free advertising, and choosing to retroactively reward you for it.

Also, can I be legally challenged or even charged for their bandwidth.

Example:

If I am routing people to another site and they are downloading from it, then that is costing the other site bandwidth (they are paying for this) - have they any way of objecting or challenging high numbers of referrals from me that they never asked, or agreed, for me to send their way?

I wonder if there would be a demand for routing people to companies that are in financial trouble/receivership/liquidation?

You know, find a company that is not doing to well, start shovelling people its way - save their asses.

You see, advertising costs - companies that don't advertise (or are not known) generally die.

Am I hitting on something here?

The bandwidth necesary is just the total aggregate of all HTTP requests directed to the site in question.
For example, you have a very tiny site, with just a single page with some links, and a .JPG logo on it. Your HTML file is 5KB. Your image is 50KB. Each visit then 'costs' you 50+5=55KB of bandwidth.

Assume your hosting package gives you 100 GB of traffic a month. 100,000,000,000 / 55,000 = 1,818,818, meaning that you could 'serve' 1,8 million page loads in a month. Of course, the more content (HTMl pages, additional images) you have, the more bytes a single visitor takes up, and the less overall people will be able to view your site before you exceed your bandwidth allotment.



Realistically, I wouldn't expect too much out of this. Yes, there are people that make a living of it, but they typically have hundreds or even thousands of domains, often misspellings of popular destinations, and often involved with spamming/scamming to get people to their site. If you have just a single page, and if you don't do anything 'shady' (and we sure hope you wouldn't), then it is unlikely to give you much financial results.

Most of the 'referrer pages' like that are based on existing expired already somewhat popular domains, and even then majority of them only barely make enough money in advertising in advertising to cover the registration costs of the domain name itself. They only reason those people get ahead is by volume.

Realistically, most people have been bludgeoned to death by those referrer sites. I know I definitely tune them out if I end up on one of them. What do you have to add that a large company like google isn't already offering people?

Unless you actually have *content* that makes people *want* to go to your site (rather than accidentally stumble across it, and hope they actually can be bothered to read anything rather than just hit 'back', close the window, or open google like most people would), it is doubtfull that you'll ever get ahead with something like this.

If you are a popular destination site for people, that actively choose to hang out there, then you have a lot of options regarding fairly profitable advertising... But plain referrer sites are mostly a dead end.

No -- their site is on the public internet, and anyone can access it. If you just tell people they they exist and where to find them, you are in no way responsible for costs they incurr from visitors.

If you tell a couple of people that the bakery store on the corner has great bagles, go check it out, the bakery has no grounds to try to get you to pay for the extra visitors wearing out their carpet, right? It's just a cost of doing business.

the only bandwidth you would need to be concerned about is the bandwidth required for your visitors to download YOUR html files and images that you store on your website, and your hosting company pretty much allows you to generate a certain amount of data transfers that would typically cover that. If you risk exceeding, most hosting companies give you a choice of either paying extra, or turning off the site for the remainder of the month. But especially with a small site, it's not likely you'll exceed the limits set by most hosting companies.

Can you make money by routing people through countries and networks?

Example:

My intitial page (in whatever country). Visitor clicks a link to go to such and such company, but I route them first to another of my sites, say in another country, that routes them somewhere else, etc, then to the target site? Any money to be made by routing people about prior to sending them to the target or is it a waste of time?

Actually, I just thought of something there:

Technically, in relation to the above post, could you route someone to another country where they are fed through a premium rate line (at some point between sites) that somehow pays you - but because they are moving between countries, there is no way of legally challenging this?

That is more of an interesting afterthought of my above post than an actual intention.

No.

The internet is the internet is the internet. You pay your own ISP to connect you to the internet, but however the packets get routed after that is of no concern to you.

There are no 'premium rate lines' -- each client and hosting company provides their own network connectivity, and they all are able to both send and receive network packets. If someone has an 'expensive' connection to their hosting server, it just means that their upstream providers charges them (too) much for the connection -- no one is making a dime on routing packets through a particular uplink connection anywhere.

the individual hosting companies just pay their internet provider for their internet connection, just like you pay yours for your DSL line. The large telephone companies and such that operate the backbones have data exchange agreements that pretty much allow them to exchange data for next to no fee with the other phone companies -- they're just trading services.

Oh.

Okey-dokey.

Thanks - I have enough to be getting on with for the moment.