My Excuse For Not Posting..

Well it has been a busy past couple weeks. I had to move 6 sites from a host that I really had high hopes for. A kid named Justin from Colorado emailed me about a year ago and offered me free web hosting for a couple of my most popular sites; http://free-templates.org and http://buildfree.org. I was flattered but skeptical and decided to use the opportunity to start out a couple new websites. Well Justin is a great guy and very smart but I think he may have bit off more that he could chew. Several times over the year my new sites suffered complete outages for hours at a time. I realize the occasional server upgrade and unforeseen disasters, but with the last Google crawl, 3 of the sites actually obtained a page rank of 2. This just means that they are now candidates to move to the mainstream and earn some possible advertising income. Well another 8 hour outage just killed me. I had just emailed a prospective client with the new sites for review. Enough said.

I also had a generous offer for the purchase of http://buildfree.org. Let's just say that generous in this case was close to 6 figures and made me re-look at my whole internet business model. I have about 20 websites that are live right now, but buildfree.org was one of my first sites and it has been around since 2003. It has a page rank of 4 and gets the most hits of any of my websites. So I use buildfree.org to promote the other websites and to help my little website family grow. buildfree.org sends traffic to all my other sites, so losing it would be like losing a parent. Not only would the revenue be lost from buildfree.org but with the other sites as well.

The first thing I had to do was investigate the buyer and to make sure they are reputable and honest. I will not reveal the company but I was satisfied this was a serious offer. We traded a lot of technical information on site traffic and revenue. The next thing I wanted to do was to get to know the contact. He turned out to be very personable and we talked many times over the last two weeks. He actually came back with a respectable counter-offer and I said I had to mull it over. I talked to my attorney and and he said no problem, he could handle it for a reasonable fee. My next question was to my accountant about the tax repercussions. He said we could get through the deal with about 25% capital gains tax. so 1/4 of the money would go right out the door.

Well it all boiled down to should I accept today what buildfree.org will earn in 2-3 years anyway? Yes it would be great to bank some money and show some results for my many hours of frustrating webmasterdom, but after some soul-searching, I had to refuse the offer. I did make a counter-offer that would justify starting my internet journey over, but we reached an impasse.

So there you go, I am still the proud owner of 20 websites, but my tires have been officially kicked..