I have been having money problems related to Canadaka.net for some time and have just been ignoring it as its gotten worse. But something has to be done.
For several years now ad revenue CKA generates has been plummeting, there are several reasons why.
- Banner advertising industry wide generates far less than it used too.
- CKA traffic has been decreased a lot from several years ago.
- People are using other methods to get news and have discussions online, primarily social media and apps.
- I have not put much development time into improving and adding to CKA. I am going to be doing some major cleanup and fixes this winter.
The current major problem is CKA is generating $0 revenue. Some of you might have noticed there have not been ads running on the site since August. My Google Adsense account for canadaka.net was banned again for inappropriate adult content on the site. I have been trying for months to appeal and get it re-activated, but they won't tell me specificity what is the problem, so i just keep deleting more stuff. But it might be that after 8+ years they just decided a site with the word "ass" in its name is banned.
Even before August the site was already generating less from Google ads than the server costs. Now I'm 3 server-hosting invoices behind and own
$2220!
CKA isn't the only site I host on my servers, but most the other sites don't get much traffic and generate very little revenue. It also uses most of the server resources.
I've also closed down a couple of sites like
http://www.bloggingcanadians.ca. In order to try and generate some more revenue i've added ads to
http://politwitter.ca/ for the first time.
I used to have a bunch of web hosting clients as well, but i've slowly been dropping those, as Its not worth the time or money. So I only have a couple sites I host for friends, charging a very small $2 a month.
I used to make a bunch of revenue from t-shirt sales as well, to help pay for server costs, but mostly I wanted to pay myself a bit, it (was) part of my living. Now the t-shirt sales don't even pay for server costs, they have dropped drastically. I think its combo of wearing printed t-shirts has fallen out of fashion a bit, saturation of the market and increased competition.
CKA also used to get a couple hundred dollars in donations a year, this has completely stopped. I don't think I've gotten any donations for CKA in 2012 or 2013. I don't expect people do donate, the ads should pay for the site. But it was a nice cushion to have. I was also banned from PayPal several years ago, so it stopped any recuring donations people had. I have a new donation page using
STRIPEcredit card processing here
http://www.trevormay.ca/donate/CKA used to also make money for paid text-links at the very bottom of the homepage, people paid to increase their search engine rankings. But Google has really put an end to this practice and that market has dried up.
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Several years ago I switched hosts, I was paying over $400 in server costs. The new host is much cheaper, at $247. But I am currently looking if I can find any cheaper solutions in the Vancouver area for server colocation. If anyone has any suggestions or contacts,
please let me know!. I'm even considering moving the servers to Seattle, there are some cheaper options in below $200 there.
This is the requirements:
- Two Dell Poweredge 1U servers.
- I will need 4 IPs.
- monthly bandwidth usage is between 500GB - 800GB.
I've also been slowly trying to transition out of running so many websites, running servers and doing web hosting. I've been doing this stuff for 14 years and its time to move on a bit. I'm not and will never close down Canadaka.net but it needs to at least pay for itself.
I'm open to any suggestions or comments.
Site Admin 
CKA Moderator 
CKA Moderator 
