Annual cost of delivering Huddersfield Exposed
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Back in 2015 when Huddersfield Exposed was first launched, I was able to comfortably run the site using web hosting that cost around £100 a year. Since then, the site has continued to grow and that’s necessitated the occasional hardware upgrade to the point where the annual cost for 2020 was about £300 and I’ve been happy to pay for that out of my pocket.
With the addition of the Newspaper OCR Project content in the last few days (which has increased the content on the site by nearly 4800%) it’s become apparent that more hardware was needed — specifically, the server that handles the database and search facility was upgraded from 2GB of memory to 8GB. The annual cost going forward is now just shy of £600.
The site generates no income whatsoever, other than the online shop and any income from that is used solely to acquire more content (old books, postcards, etc) for the site.
So, what I’d like to do is to find a way forward that helps to offset the extra hardware costs. I’d be keen to hear if you have any suggestions but here are some initial thoughts…
Website Hosting
If you’re a local company, society or organisation looking for low-cost website hosting on a fast and secure server, perhaps as an alternative to Wix or Weebly, I can provide a WordPress based site or similar which can include e-commerce functionality. Drop me an email for more details (davepattern@gmail.com). I’m a web admin & developer with 25 years’ experience and I’ve been hosting WordPress sites since 2005.
Fundraising
Similar to archive.org and Wikipedia, a banner at the top of the page allowing visitors to make a donation towards the hosting costs.
Patrons
Offer supporters of the site benefits in return for a small regular (monthly/annual?) donation. The benefits could be a hefty discount code for the online shop and access to non-watermarked images in the site archive.
Adverts
I’m investigating Google AdSense and media.net as options for showing ads on the newspaper OCR pages. Personally, I’m not a fan of ads on websites, so this might be the “if all else fails” option.
Sponsorship
Perhaps as an alternative to adverts, a local company could sponsor the site. Since the aim is to raise just £25 per month, this would perhaps be a simple “Huddersfield Exposed is kindly sponsored by …” message on every page with a link to the sponsor’s website?
I’m going to discount “Adverts” as neither Google AdSense or media.net were able to supply adverts that are in keeping with the content of Huddersfield Exposed.
In the meantime, I’ve added affiliate links to Find My Past and British Newspaper Archive. I’m not expecting that these will generate much income as a user would need to start a subscription to either site after following a link and I’d expect only a small number of people might decide to do that.
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