[powerchaos]

nice post

but if you allow me , i got a few comments about a few things

Ads are not evil. Yes, some networks do happen to allow annoying and harmful ads (ones that play sounds, ones that "break" their assigned space and get right in your face, ones that install viruses and spyware on your computer in the background) but stick to trusted ones like Google Adsense and you'll be ok. Or, start your own ad-server and easily sell your own ad space. If you set your own policies, you can enforce it.

the comment i have over this is personal but not for 100%

it goes about google adsense , i tryed about 25 differend ad programs and they give all the same problem (specialy google gives the biggest problem)

google bans you from the moment you got 100$+ and request a payout
i got 2X banned from google adsense , 1X from a proxy site and 1X from a mybb multi forum (click fraude was the reason for both )
so i was losing a lot of money and time on them when they make profit with my ads

then my second comment

ake sure your provider knows to give you AT LEAST 72 hours notice of ANY server maintenance - NO exceptions. Get it in your Service Level Agreement/contract.

there is something that is called unexpected , that means that a datacenter/host is not possible to warn you 72 hours before it will happends , else it is a planned maint and those stuff are always warned

depends what host you have , they say if they do maints every XX days or they do maints only when it is needed
a ip change will never happends with a good host , as ip's are locked to the main server and not to a account
even if the ip change then you wont notice it , as the domain name takes care of the ip :D

the point i mean with it , it is not possible to put it in your sla (service level agreement) as it is just imposible to warn before something unexpected happends
its the host that need to keep everything online no mather what happends , but you can not expect them that they need to warn you 72 hours before they do a upgrade of there firewall ??

then a other thing i like to give comment on

You didn't expect the worst.

you say that they need to make backups , but so far i know are backups not a responsibility of the host
specialy not when you offer your clients to take backups

it is the same as my clients , i got 1 main backup that i make every 2 days (3X per week)
but if a client lost his webiste , i do not going restore the backup for it , as the backup is for when the server goes badly wrong and not to restore a client his site when he desided to delete index.html

it is the client itself there responsibility to take care of what can happends , not the host , the clients can not blame you for it as they should know about it
specialy when you "forget" to put in the tos that you make backups ^^

then my final comment

You're not taking your job seriously. You have to take every portion of your job seriously. When you start out, you have to wear many hats and fill every role. Honestly, you can do it. It's harder than it sounds but it is possible.

it depends what you mean with this

i know persones who do everything they can to start up a mybb forum but are not able to do it
then i know other persones who do nothing on it and got it better running then you can think of

it depends on the skills and the way you take care of it (he does not even have plugins and templates , just a basic install on a .info domain)

and that is differend per persone to persone
ofcourse if you do not promote , then you wont be able to get clients , but if you promote and your website is broken , then you wont get clients eather
so thats what i mean with that it depends how you take care of stuff

hopely this cleared up a few things where i got comment over

but i need to say , this is basicly more personal experiance comment and it does not apply to every1
every persone is differend , i know even persones who got a website with only ads on it and they gain 150k visitors per month (just ads on a subdomain)

hopely this post can help you to make your desisions :D

Greetings From PowerChaos