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Changes are coming!
The GarySeven site opened in December 1999 and, if you've been visiting since
the early days, you may remember that it used to be hosted on some freespace at
virgin.net.
 Within
three months, I'd exceeded my allowed 10Mb of server space. So, rather sneakily,
I signed up for a second Virgin account.
Having the site split like that wasn't ideal, so I moved the Journal over to Badpuppy.
I've had a site of some kind on Badpuppy since 1996! I love those guys :-)
In May 2001, Virgin made some changes and there began to be periods when the server
was down. So, I moved the entire GarySeven site to Badpuppy, where it has remained
for more than a year.
The site is now huge! The Journal section alone is more than 30Mb in size. Badpuppy
has been great and has been a first class host. Certain Badpuppy staff are well-known
among the webmaster community for their friendly and efficient service!
Many people seem to think that it doesn't cost anything to run a website. Not
true! Someone has to cover the cost of the space that all the files take up on
the server. And then there is a charge for every single byte of data that is transferred
off the server as each visitor views the pages.
So, imagine someone browses through my gallery of 50 Manchester GayFest 2001 images.
They transfer 2.5Mb of data and it costs someone, somewhere (currently Badpuppy),
a penny.
 One
penny might seem negligible. But then consider that particular gallery is just
1/25th of the entire site and also that, on Monday 17 June, 1606 people visited
GarySeven. And you'll begin to see how those hosting costs add up.
The other cost is to me... A lot of the equipment that I use to put together
these pages and to run the webcam is, frankly, dropping to bits, and is very likely
to fail completely before the end of this year. Software needs updating and then
there is the time that I spend. I enjoy working on the site but, often, it takes
me away from other (better paid) work.
So where does the money come from? After all, no one pays to access any part of
my site. Well, in the past, a tiny proportion of visitors bought a Badpuppy membership,
a video, or a magazine. Badpuppy got a small amount and so did I. However, over
the last six months, that income has dwindled to almost nothing.
Now this is not intended to be a criticism of you, dear visitor, or a complaint.
I'm just stating something that's a fact of life for virtually every webmaster
on the Internet today.
But now things need to change. I'm not closing down GarySeven and a small amount
of stuff will remain at Badpuppy and will take a slightly different direction.
However, most of the current site will move to:
www.garysevenuk.com
I need to try out new things and I've run out of options with the site in its
current location.
Normally at this point I would blab all my ideas to you. But I'm not going to
reveal exactly what I'll be doing, because I've noticed that another well-known
site seems to pick up ideas from my pages (and sometimes even colour schemes!).
And it's quite annoying when I mention something and then he goes and does it
before I do! ;-)
However, in the new location, I'll be paying all the costs myself. So the days
of 1600 people a day streaming through the site, with access to 40Mb of free content,
and it resulting in no income, have got to be over!
Click here to visit the Badpuppy website
GETTING IN TOUCH
See the contact
page for full details of how you can reach me by e-mail or chat.
All content is
�copy; Copyright GarySevenUK.com 1999-2006.
Read more here
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