$100 a Day Challenge: September Website Updates – Entry #3

How I Saved $755! – September 2024 Updates

Note: I will be updating this post throughout the month of September.

Reseller vs Shared Hosting

I looked at my credit card statement this month and was shocked at the number of GoDaddy charges. Yes, like most folks, I own a bunch of Domains and as you know, am running multiple websites. When you start a new website, your see the price of $12.99/month for shared hosting on GoDaddy and it sounds good. But one day you see the charges and start doing the math and realize, Holy Shit, I’m paying a lot of money for hosting websites.

I started doing some research and realized I’d be much better off if I had a reseller hosting account. In my research, I decided to get a Knownhost reseller account. By my rudimentary calculations, I’ll be able to save $755 per year in hosting. Sounds crazy right? But below is my basic math:

	GoDaddy Basic Managed WordPress	GoDaddy Deluxe Managed WordPress	Yearly Cost
TheFoundationisCracking.com	$12.99		$155.88
HoveringHelicopter.com	$12.99		$155.88
TheBikeRacer.com	$16.99		$203.88
CloudSeedingtheSky.com	$16.99		$203.88
		Yearly Total	$719.52
GoDaddy Email Hosting	Monthly Charge
TheFoundationisCracking.com	$7.99		$95.88
HoveringHelicopter.com	$7.99		$95.88
TheBikeRacer.com	$8.99		$107.88
CloudSeedingtheSky.com	$7.99		$95.88
		Yearly Total	$395.52
		Webhosting & Email Yearly Total	$1,115.04
	Monthly Charge
Knownhost Reller Account (75 Websites)	$29.95	Yearly Total	$359.40
		Total Yearly Savings	$755.64

Migrating my websites was easy. It took me a few minutes to get used to using the Cpanel and WHM interfaces on Knownhost. It has been a while since I used a cPanel. But once I figured out how to create the domains and install wordpress on the domains, it was fairly straightforward. I used the All-in-On WordPress widget to migrate the websites. It was super easy. The key was keeping up with the temporary usernames on the initial WordPress installs.

I did run into one issue with the SSL certificates, but Knownhost‘s support was excellent and resolved the issue. It was my fault really in the initial setup. The 3 remaining installs went smoothly and I didn’t have any issues migrating the websites.

NOTE: I am working on getting a refund for my unused hosting from GoDaddy. They don’t make it easy and their policy is that you have 30 Days to cancel your hosting to get a refund. But I called and pressed the Customer Service rep to get a refund. She finally admitted that I can request a refund using a special GoDaddy Request a Refund Exception form.

I did read that I needed to delete my subscriptions to (hopefully) get a refund. So I’ve done that. I’ll keep everyone posted on my refund status.

Click Here to get to the GoDaddy Request a Refund Exception form.

Coffee Mugs and Hats – Etsy

Etsy has been making changes to their search engine and it telling it’s users how to improve their listings for better search results. One of the changes they are suggesting is to lower your shipping costs. This is definitely controversial and you can search Youtube to find many experts explaining this in detail – why the agree and disagree.

I decided to play along and reduced the shipping on my 15oz coffee mugs to $5.49 for the first mug and $2.49 for the second. This is a bargain because shipping from my supplier is $8.99! But I also raised the shipping on my 11oz mugs from $4.49 to the same shipping profile. Now I have one shipping profile in Etsy for all of my coffee mugs.

Etsy said the changes will take place in October so we’ll have to wait and see if this affects my listings and orders. But I have to admit, Etsy is making it very easy to find the listings that need to be updated and also make it very easy to make the updates. I’ve attached two images below to show you how Etsy is accomplishing this.

The Foundation is Cracking

I was looking at analytics this morning (9/11) an saw something I haven’t seen. This site has finally started getting picked up for some keywords. Here’s the catch, all of the keywords are focused around a ‘list of senators’. One of the things I want this website to be is a resource and one of the pages is a list of Senators in Congress with their contact information.

I though it would be easy to find a good list and simply cut and paste. Guess what, I was wrong. So I started manually creating the list and adding the addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc. ONE BY ONE. Well, like most of my projects…I got sidetracked (can you say squirrel?) But after looking at the analytics, it’s time to finish the list because people are obviously looking for this resource.

Add it to the list!