Buying and Selling Web space?

MrEmptyMoneyBag

I know this has been done billions (literary) of times before. But I was wondering whether it is still possible to become a re-seller of web space and make a profit?

Also, I was thinking (again been done before, many times) creating a website and making money from banners/affiliates etc. I was thinking if I could get 5 websites making £20 a month it would help a little.

Any thoughts? Suggestions and advice is much appreciated

Thanks

MoneyBag

hamcaster

Hi,

The web space reseller market is pretty much flooded, you would have to try and fight to break into it. Also, if you go down this path, you will get asked a LOT of very technical questions - if you don't have the expertise in this area, I would say you'll struggle a lot.

For the websites - it depends on whether you have a good idea for a site (or 5 good ideas!), but £20 a month from advertising is actually quite a lot (or if you mean £20 per site, £100 total per month, that's a figure the majority of website owners dream about, but never achieve). The web is flooded with sites which are designed to make money, and as a result advertisers have so much choice, and it makes it very difficult for website owners to make any money.

If you're serious about starting up websites, bear in mind - for the first while (most likely a year at least) you will get virtually nothing back from them, and even then, when you work out how much you make back, against the hours you've spent developing them, chances are the hourly rate will be considerably less than minimum wage.

I don't want to seem like I'm passing your ideas off as rubbish, they're not, but I have quite a bit of experience in this field, and there are thousands of people who are doing exactly what you're considering, expecting it to be easy money, and it's really not.

If you have good ideas, and want to go ahead, feel free to get in touch, and I'll be happy to help wherever I can.

MrEmptyMoneyBag

guffyuk wrote: »

Hi,

The web space reseller market is pretty much flooded, you would have to try and fight to break into it. Also, if you go down this path, you will get asked a LOT of very technical questions - if you don't have the expertise in this area, I would say you'll struggle a lot.

For the websites - it depends on whether you have a good idea for a site (or 5 good ideas!), but £20 a month from advertising is actually quite a lot (or if you mean £20 per site, £100 total per month, that's a figure the majority of website owners dream about, but never achieve). The web is flooded with sites which are designed to make money, and as a result advertisers have so much choice, and it makes it very difficult for website owners to make any money.

If you're serious about starting up websites, bear in mind - for the first while (most likely a year at least) you will get virtually nothing back from them, and even then, when you work out how much you make back, against the hours you've spent developing them, chances are the hourly rate will be considerably less than minimum wage.

I don't want to seem like I'm passing your ideas off as rubbish, they're not, but I have quite a bit of experience in this field, and there are thousands of people who are doing exactly what you're considering, expecting it to be easy money, and it's really not.

If you have good ideas, and want to go ahead, feel free to get in touch, and I'll be happy to help wherever I can.

Thanks for the advice, too be honest I thought along these types of lines but thought I would see other people's options. I think I will give it a miss for now.

MrEmptyMoneyBag

Mr_Oink wrote: »

As a wild guess because they value not being cut off by their service providers or prosecuted for spamming?



I have a quote from that website:


Good luck with that. I'm offering some lessons in Internet Marketing Gullibility Avoidance. Send me £50 by Western Union or Moneygram and I'll share my secrets with you......

money sent hope those secrets are worth it :cool:

MrEmptyMoneyBag

I do have another question, but don't want to open another thread. What are people's views on buying computer parts from eBay and such, then building a computer to sell on for a profit? I have some experience in build computers and feel could learn what I don't know quickly. Any thoughts?

Mr_Oink

MrEmptyMoneyBag wrote: »

I do have another question, but don't want to open another thread. What are people's views on buying computer parts from eBay and such, then building a computer to sell on for a profit? I have some experience in build computers and feel could learn what I don't know quickly. Any thoughts?

There may still be some money to be made in used PC's if you pick your base components well. Bear in mind top end, multi-core machines don't cost much now - and that the market is saturated with 'old' stuff - so you'd probably rely on scale, luck (or I hate to say it - Customer Stupidity) to a degree.

I would say the biggest issues are the 'O' word and the 'S' word:
O: Operating System. Whilst I'm happy to use Linux, most people want Windows and that will usually double the cost of any device you make for resale.
S: Support. It's quite one thing to sell a machine for £80 and turn a £20 profit, but when that new owner becomes needy or something dies in it (say an old 250g hdd) your reputation and pocket will suffer. It's not for the feint hearted.

My own advice would, as always, be based on the 'Gold Rush' philosophy. For those not familiar with the phrase it refers, rather predictably, to the great US Gold rush where the men making the steady money were the hardware vendors selling picks and shovels. 'Sell them the dream'. Vending the *hardware parts* for other people to build PC's to sell for profit will probably net you a better and less hassle return. Look for old PC's on Freecycle/freggle and *any* hardware you can get your hands on for free. Break it down, sell the parts.

A bizarre truth for you here. Last year I was given a pile of old Linux based email appliances (returns/rma's) by a company that sells them here in the UK on behalf of the US maker. They normally had to pay £16 each to get rid of them and have the discs wiped to a satisfactory level - which is something I do and certify*. These were all 1u 19" servers running on a P4 with a gig of memory. Despite listing them for weeks in all the right places I could not move them for £75 each. I think I sold one of about 30. So, I stripped them down and sold the parts exceeding the £75 per box I was trying to make. The mind boggles, but I made the price of a cup of tea out of it.


*<tangent>for anyone who needs to erase drives fast to DoD standards don't mess about with the usual slow suggestions - Secureerase will typically do the job in about 16-20 minutes: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml</tangent&gt;

MrEmptyMoneyBag

Mr_Oink wrote: »

There may still be some money to be made in used PC's if you pick your base components well. Bear in mind top end, multi-core machines don't cost much now - and that the market is saturated with 'old' stuff - so you'd probably rely on scale, luck (or I hate to say it - Customer Stupidity) to a degree.

I would say the biggest issues are the 'O' word and the 'S' word:
O: Operating System. Whilst I'm happy to use Linux, most people want Windows and that will usually double the cost of any device you make for resale.
S: Support. It's quite one thing to sell a machine for £80 and turn a £20 profit, but when that new owner becomes needy or something dies in it (say an old 250g hdd) your reputation and pocket will suffer. It's not for the feint hearted.

My own advice would, as always, be based on the 'Gold Rush' philosophy. For those not familiar with the phrase it refers, rather predictably, to the great US Gold rush where the men making the steady money were the hardware vendors selling picks and shovels. 'Sell them the dream'. Vending the *hardware parts* for other people to build PC's to sell for profit will probably net you a better and less hassle return. Look for old PC's on Freecycle/freggle and *any* hardware you can get your hands on for free. Break it down, sell the parts.

A bizarre truth for you here. Last year I was given a pile of old Linux based email appliances (returns/rma's) by a company that sells them here in the UK on behalf of the US maker. They normally had to pay £16 each to get rid of them and have the discs wiped to a satisfactory level - which is something I do and certify*. These were all 1u 19" servers running on a P4 with a gig of memory. Despite listing them for weeks in all the right places I could not move them for £75 each. I think I sold one of about 30. So, I stripped them down and sold the parts exceeding the £75 per box I was trying to make. The mind boggles, but I made the price of a cup of tea out of it.


*<tangent>for anyone who needs to erase drives fast to DoD standards don't mess about with the usual slow suggestions - Secureerase will typically do the job in about 16-20 minutes: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml</tangent&gt;

Thanks for the reply, I was thinking of going to the local dump and seeing if I could get any parts worth selling on

PasturesNew

I make money with websites/banners, etc etc. You do put in long hours at first, but once it's set up, you can walk away from it for months at a time and the money still comes in .... I know, because I set mine up in 2006 and since then I've just had bursts of enthusiasm.

Once you get a new idea into your head, you can lock yourself away for days ... but once it's over, you can consider it done.

However, my weakness is that I am not pursuing the money, I am genuinely interested in finding out how things work, how it all fits together, guessing at what will go well on my sites ... and endless faffing about with ideas and stuff .... if I just picked ONE thing and just did it I could make loads. But for me, the interest is in the research and fiddling.

You have good days and bad days. Yesterday was a good day, then today was turning out to be a bit of a bad day (traffic still arriving at my site, but CTR down by half and ePCM half)... then randomly I received two separate emails saying that some company or other had just paid me, so that was a nice $61 to turn my bad day into a good day.

Every day I make new discoveries, investigate something that interests me, I tweet, I blog, I write, I tweak, I optimise, I check my stats and tweak again. I love it!

PasturesNew

MrEmptyMoneyBag wrote: »

I do have another question, but don't want to open another thread. What are people's views on buying computer parts from eBay and such, then building a computer to sell on for a profit? I have some experience in build computers and feel could learn what I don't know quickly. Any thoughts?

The problem you might get is that you can sell them .... then forever have that customer on the phone expecting free support. It's like you're forever connected to them... for free.

Nobody sells a car, then for the next 4 years has the person on the phone asking about how to fill it up, how should they drive, where they can buy more CDs from, where's the best place to get furry dice, can you stop by on your way home and service it for free.... but for individuals, selling PCs, this can be a major issue.

I actually built a website for somebody one year ... and even two years later they'd phone me up every time their PC was misbehaving. One call was literally "Our PC's not working, we'd just gone onto the internet to look at our website and it stopped working ... can you come and look at it" as if my hand-coded-in-notepad, simple flat-file .html website I'd written for them 3 years previous was the reason!!