Well the time has finally come… the time to say goodbye to the dedicated server. I can’t believe I’m blogging about this – admitting it to myself was hard enough. Maybe putting it out there for everyone to see will help me move past it.
After some soul searching and serious thinking for the past few weeks, I have decided that I need to get rid of my dedicated server. In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be moving my personal websites to a shared environment and getting rid of my hosting clients. I still have a few from the RTech days – like 5. But I simply can’t afford the server anymore – for the first time in almost 10 years. My online “business” isn’t really a business anymore… economy or poor choices or laziness or whatever… the fact is I am not making enough money to cover the server anymore. And that has been incredibly hard for me to admit to myself let alone blog about it… So I’m going back to basics for awhile which means getting rid of most of my business expenses including the server. The few hosting clients I have just don’t cover the cost of the server for the year and my income isn’t doing that either anymore.
I have been running some form of online business since 2000. I started with web design and then grew it to be more of a small biz hosting service. Hosting got way to stressful for me. As more and more of my clients were starting to make good money from their websites the need to be able to offer real 24/7 support increased. And by the end of 2004 after losing hard drives on 3 different servers it was time to call it quits. I probably could have grown the biz by adding staff but the reality was I didn’t want the stress that comes with running a hosting business anymore.
Since then I have been focused more on designing and for the past 2 years, I have put A LOT of money into getting a licensing business off the ground… and it just isn’t getting there right now. I honestly think we put the horse before the cart and went wild with spending instead of growing the biz a little first. We had “licensing educated” people tell us that we needed to invest a lot upfront – money to trademark , money for lawyer contract, money for “coaching”, money for tradeshows. HA! Maybe the trademark and the contracts piece was worth it but I think we spent way to much money on “coaching” which didn’t end up paying for itself – in my opinion – and we probably didn’t need to exhibit that first year like we did. A lot of the coaching was just common business sense and often on phone calls I would get frustrated because we weren’t learning anything all that new.
I have always built foundations before spending a lot of money to grow my businesses but in this case I spent goober money without having a base to support the everyday expenses of running it. A hard lesson for me I guess. Decisions that if I had to do them over again I would choose differently. We dug ourselves a huge hole and have been trying to dig ourselves out during the worst economy in my lifetime. So I made the decision to go back to grass roots – somewhere I haven’t been since I started my first online business in 2000. I’m getting rid of all my heavy business expenses including the server.
Back in April, Rick and I finally cleaned up our personal finances and they have stayed cleaned. We paid off our car, our HELO, refinanced, and put our expenses in order. I even blogged about it – here. We are now living on a cash basis and only charge gas each month. I really do not want my biz expenses creeping into our personal finances especially now that they are back on track. We still have a few bumps every now and then and are learning how to be cash base again but I can’t and won’t go back to the financial nightmare we had been living for the past 3 years.
So… this means that my biz expenses have to be drastically cut to the point where any money I bring in can start paying down that debt not just breaking even. So for the first time in almost 10 years, I am going back to shared hosting which trust me has not been an easy decision at all for me.
I have been looking at HostGator as a possible host to transfer to. I still can’t believe their plan and I’ve always been of the opinion that those plans fail. However, they have been around for awhile and are not fly-by-night. I’m sure there will be bumps in the road – like servers going down because the load is crazy… but if I’m just hosting myself, it’s not a such a priority at this point. They seem to have a decent reputation and have been around awhile. Cost is just a bigger concern for me right now. Anyway, I am planning on moving all of my personal accounts over to them within the next few weeks.
As an aside to all this – When I was at my cousins wedding reception this past Sunday, my aunt made a comment to me that in the moment I laughed off. But it’s been nawing at me over the past few days. I had told her that Jeanine was going to have to start looking for freelance work outside of KV because KV was just not bringing in money right now. She said “Yeah, she needs to find a way to earn real money and stop playing business with you”…. hmm… I’m sure she didn’t mean that in a hurtful way but it has made me stop and wonder if that is what I look like to my family – outside of Rick who has always supported me in whatever I’m doing. I’m “playing business”?? I have NEVER thought that EVER. In fact, I have always considered RTech incredibly successful for just being a little company that a stay at home mom raising twins who were under 4 at the time. I created a business that I eventually turned around and sold. Not for a crazy sum but for a few tens of thousands. I built something that someone else saw enough value in to want to buy it. That has to count for something.
Part of me is sad and frustrated with myself that it got to this point. The other part is actually happy because it’s like a fresh start. I have reinvented myself before and I can certainly do it again.