Well currently my wonderful host doesn’t charge me. It started as a favor from a guy who owed me $1400 but he passed me off to somebody who owed him a favor, and then we ended up getting along and the guy liked my site. I have also managed to weasel my way out of being suspended for various things like threats from Microsoft Lawyers and the DiGG effect (which I haven’t done in a LONG time btw, probably about time again).

The games on the site don’t take up that much bandwidth as once you are playing them (and they are small to download) that’s all there is to it. I don’t have the artwork available in a gallery so that people won’t try to steal all the images or hotlink to them. The audio files I keep on free off-site storage and the video files, well… they aren’t mine… but I thank youtube and other fine video hosting sites for allowing me to embed their FLV files ; ) Also because I make the site in AJAX (i know, everybody wants a back button to exist with AJAX but you can’t have everything) it doesn’t take too much bandwidth to insert new content into my pages.

Ultimately I keep trying to reduce the size of my pages, scripts and files so that I use less bandwidth so that I can stay with my free hosting. However on the current course that I am on (#5 on Google for just the word smartass, plan to be #1 by the end of the year) I do suspect that soon I will have to start paying for the hosting which is why I started my Good Stuff section to try to make money. So far it’s just merchandise (that nobody really buys) but I will eventually add links to affiliates, however they will all be on that page and will all be products that I personally buy and recommend, so perhaps some of the visitors could simply buy through my referral links instead of just going direct to the site like amazon and newegg (come on, you know you shop there). I am doing this and hoping that it works because I despise ad-banners and don’t want to force people to pay to use features on my site. I figure I have donated to sites that I liked, eventually somebody will do the same for my own. Alas, only time will tell.