For some time now I have decided not to have banner ads on this blog. I think sites with banner ads look cluttered, and for the small amount of money they could generate I think it’s nicer for the people who read this blog if I don’t have them. As a rule, I also don’t provide commercial links with places I don’t have some relationship with or places I don’t believe are good to do business with. With banner ads it’s hard to be this selective.
Today I put up my first ever ad, for my hosting provider. You can find the ad graphic on the bottom of the front page of this blog.
Apart from the food we eat, the cars we drive and heating our homes, probably one of the most energy intensive things we do is use our computers and the Internet. As a US based company, Dreamhost is not obliged to reduce their carbon emissions or purchase carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol.
As well as trying to reduce their energy consumption, Dreamhost has voluntarily chosen to purchase carbon credits with the intention of making their business carbon neutral. As I continue to look for ways to reduce my own energy consumption, I am pleased my hosting provider is doing the same thing. I hope many more companies all over the world start doing the same thing.
A hosting provider is a company that will ‘host’ an Internet domain for you. They normally handle your email and web site as well as provide you with things like blogs, photo galleries or online shops. These are things many Internet Service Providers do, or in the case of blogs or Internet sites you can find them other places online for free, but a hosting provider will let you have all of these things in one place on a personalized domain. In addition, you can change your Internet Service Provider and still keep your email address and domains. If you are unhappy with Dreamhost, it’s also not difficult to switch to a different hosting provider.
I wish I could say I was completely satisfied with Dreamhost, but I’m not. Especially the last few months have seen several frustrating and extended outages in service with them. Searching on the Internet will show many heated discussions between customers who were very upset with them. If you sign up for service with them, don’t expect it to be trouble free! At the same time, for the price I think the service is good. I also think their customer service is excellent, and when they have a problem they work around the clock until it’s solved. I have no reason to believe another similarly priced hosting company would provide a better level of service.
I think Dreamhost’s biggest problem is more that they have a few, loud, poorly behaved customers, rather than a serious problem with their level of service.
For all but the most power users, Dreamhost has virtually no limits on disk use or bandwidth. You can have as many domains or subdomains as you want. You are allowed a very generous number of mailboxes and email addresses. You are allowed unlimited blogs or other web site installations. For most people, the cheapest plan offered is enough, for as little as US$8 per month.
And, yes, if you follow the link on the front page of this blog and sign up for an account with them, I will get a little bit of money. It’s my intention to apply any money I get from this towards the cost of running this site, and if I have any left over donate it to charity.
Don’t sign up with Dreamhost for the sole purpose of supporting this site! If you were thinking of signing up with Dreamhost anyway, consider doing it by following the link on this blog.
Thanks for the info.
Hey Patrick,
Thanks for that thoughtful full disclosure.
I went through pretty much the same process in considering ads on my site, and have a similar basic attitude towards advertising as you seem to. I’ve found no clear resolution, so I leave it for now to people to make up their own minds.
My purpose in blogging is to share, not advertise or “make money”, yet successful sharing results in a form of wealth that is earned much like cash. So the blog is not like a private, locked journal, there is an intention (if not a deliberate plan) to make it grow. I can “afford” the relatively small cost of publishing the blog as it is now. If the traffic rose significantly, so would the cost, and at some point it would become for me an “expense” that I would have to fund from some source. And so on…
It’s an insidious thing. What if a company sends me seeds or a garden tool to “try out”? Would I record it on the blog, thereby instantly providing editorial mention (the most valuable form of publicity for a company)? Even if I acknowledge that aspect in a post, it is still advertising favoring the company that made the deliberate effort to promote. I will be using any trust I may have earned to promote something completely apart from my own experience. Do I even “like” that company, let alone want to endorse it? And how do I treat borderline comment spam (as just happened to me for the first time): do I remove any comment that refers to the commenter’s own products or services (in this case, I made a judgement call, commented on the the comment, and left it). Phew…
Each tiny step one takes from contemplating literally the seeds in the soil, including blogging about it, the complications of dealing with the larger reality multiply. I’m trying to figure it out as I go… 🙂
Thanks for the feedback!
Mike: What you say about accepting gifts has been discussed on some other blogs in recent months. Jane on Horitcultural recently posted a policy for this. She states she will give away anything she gets, after posting about it if she wants to (good or bad). Personally, I would feel free to keep gifts of modest value.
If someone sent me something completely unsolicited and out of the blue, I would keep it and feel free to say or not say anything I wanted, good or bad. If someone contacted me in advance, and negotiated terms for giving me something, I would discuss it with them if I was interested.
The one thing that is key is I would be 100% honest about the circumstances under which I acquired something. I would also never agree in advance to promote or say something nice about a product, that I didn’t know anything about.
As far as comments go, I’m a little more flexible. Spam is spam, and I don’t tolerate that. On the other hand if someone writes a comment specifically for this blog, that is in some way related to the topic at hand and makes a promotion for a product, I would probably accept that.
What’s key to comments on blogs is they have a ‘nofollow’ directive, meaning search engines will ignore them for ranking purposes. If anyone posts a comment that tries to get around this directive (with a ‘rel nofollow’ statement), I will either refuse the comment or edit it appropriately. In this way it’s hard for anyone to promote their product very effectively by solely posting about it in blog comments.
But this is a very important subject to think about!
What about having your web site powered by solar….AISO.Net (http://www.aiso.net) is 100% solar powered, both their servers and data center are powered by onsite solar panels. And they also have a partnership with Co-Op America, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Green Building Council. Plus, they are doing more then just making sure their electricity is green. Their data center and office is green too by using environmentally friendly air conditioners, solar tubes to bring in natural light, a propane powered generator instead of diesel, VMWare virtualization to reduce their server electricity usage, 6 watt energy saving desktop computers for their employees, and soon to be LEED certified as a green data center, the only public one in North America, at least that I have found so far.