== fot at autox.team.net supported in part by Fat Chance Garage
== http://fatchancegarage.com
How much does it cost? Hard to say. The FOT list is one of over
100 I manage. Something like 85 under majordomo, another couple of
dozen under mailman [ http://www.team.net/mailman/listinfo ] and
another dozen or two under different domains. And the web sites for
my wife's dance group, Zivio, is here, and utahblues and utah Lotus
museum and the Bucklebusters site and the hiker's site and such.
RealSoonNow I'll be working on my bradakis.com site, too!
Actual out of pocket expenses are the monthly ISP charges ($39) and
the DSL phone line, another $40 or so, and whatevr portion of the
electric bill goes to keep the servers powered up and runnng. Roughly
about $1,000 a year. The semi-erratic fund drives cover those costs,
as well as the occasional hardware replacement or upgrade, more backup
tapes and such.
Now, what portion of that $1,000 does the FOT list accrue? Hard to say.
I actually haven't done a subscriber and message count lately, but there
was a time when my server was sending out 4 - 5 million messages per month
to about 15,000 people around the planet. If I could get all 15,000 to send
me 10 bucks a year maybe *I* could buy a Ford GT! Saw one in person on the
streets of Salt Lake about two months ago, neat. If I got them all to send
me 10 bucks *a month* I'd have a bigger shop, and it would probably still
be full of rusty old projects ;-)
Still pushing out about a gigabyte of ones and zeroes every day, though.
Of the 100+ lists, some get lots of traffic, some, well, when was the last
time any amphicar subscribers saw a message from that list? Maybe next week
when I get back from some grunt work for a friend in Moab I'll tally up some
message counts.
One thing I haven't done, and probably never will, is track the actual
time I spend keeping it all running. If I had the cold, hard facts in
front of me I'd probably pull the plug and stick to working on cars!
But that won't happen for a while. One thing I am doing is working on
a parts exchange database, web based and possibly an email interface
too. I'm thinking it would be a subscriber-only type arrangement, still
thinking about it while working on the code.
If your still reading, you may recall it wasn't that long ago when I had
mentioned that there might be some advertising and sponsorship deals that
would start creeping into various Team.Net services. The little header
about the Fat Chance Garage on the FOT list ( and a couple others ) is
testing the waters, so to speak. There may be a real sponsor or two
listed soon. Of course, I forgot to turn on the logging stuff I was
going to use to see if traffic to fatchancegarage.com increased after
those lines appeared in messages. Hard to say how effective they might
be. I do wish, however, that people would edit them out of their replies,
but that's another topic for later. [ *%&#$ Outlook Excrement! ]
For now, another sip of Bowmore [ single-malt is one of the mailman lists ]
and maybe a few replies to some other messages and a quick look at my
favorite bbq sites.
mjb.
http://utahlotusmuseum.com
http://utahblues.org
http://bucklebusters.com
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