Donate To The Cost Of Developing And Hosting The Weight Loss Calculator.

At the risk of stating the obvious a web site has two costs, the cost to create and maintain it and the cost to host it.

We all know that good, useful web sites take a lot of time and effort to create and we are accustomed to them being free.

So asking for donations is still quite rare on the internet, but it is becoming more common although it is still a tricky thing to do as it can get people's back up.

I try to explain the subject in this way; Cup of take-away coffee, £3, that's fine, magazine £5 an issue, that's fine, I've spent a hour on that web site £3, that's fine,


Simple web sites are indeed easy to create, however this calculator isn't really a web site, it is a serious bit of programming that just happens to have a browser as the front end.

it's not just the time spent coding the simulation or the web site to display it, it's the time spent on research, how many times have you looked at a web site and thought that's just cut and paste from another site?

To put this into context I have roughly 160 hours invested into this project so far.


If you have a simple site then it is possible to get hosting that is almost free.

For the hosting company to be able to offer such a low price they tend to allocate a lot of web sites to a smallish pool of resources and if your site takes up too many of those resources you are asked to move on to a more expensive plan.

Once you need to move on the price start to increase rapidly and it is very easy to be paying £600-£1,500 per year to host what seems like a simple site.

It is a combination of how complex the site is, what it does times the number of users, especially if you have a "Save My Simulation" type button (database demanding) or complex calculations (CPU demanding).


The trouble with advertising is that it gets in the way of the page layout, if you don't stick your adverts in the most annoying places on the page they won't be clicked on.

I am experimenting with well placed and carefully considered adverts along with links to other sites of mine, but the typical industry norms don't seem promising. For example one mail order bike dealer was offering a £10 commission on a £1,000 bike but only if the customer ordered within 30 days of clicking on the link and there is a delay period typically between 30 and 140 days before the commission is paid.

Added to which adverts can easily create the impression that the site was created to sell advertising rather than do whatever the site was set-up to do. After all many sites do exist solely to sell advertising.

My PayM phone number: 07429 340861

With PayM you use your bank's mobile phone app to make payments, so it is not a scam, it just sounds like it could be.

It's big advantage is that it has much lower fees than many card processors who have something like a minimum fee of 30p-40p per transaction, that's a lot when considering a donation of £1, £2 or £3.

Recently some card processors have started offering a special rate for low value transactions, I suspect quite reluctantly. :-)

As this is a donation the suggested amount is around the cost of a coffee, a beer or similar but please feel free to donate whatever you feel appropriate.

Link to the PayM website.

The numbers quoted above can't be right.

Advertising as a bolt on to a web site can be a lot less lucrative than you may be expecting.

Certain sites that exist to sell advertsing do, do a lot better. A holiday review site can advertise holidays and a gambling site can advertise on-line casinos, this model can be very profitable as the audience has often come to the site looking for links rather than that site's actual content.

There are two advertising models, pay per click and pay per sale, for simplicity's sake you can assume that the commissions average out as the same, if you are lucky. You may get 10p for a click on a perfume site or 5% of the sale price, the advertiser will have come to the percentage by dividing the amount of commission that they want to pay divided by the number of clicks needed to get a sale.

There used to be pay per display but this has generally died out for the general website owner.

To try and put these revenue numbers into context, in England the minimum wage for an adult is £8.72 per hour, or £317 per week or £1,417 per month.

So trying to fund one person on minimum wage without taking into account the cost of office space, equipment, holiday etc. requires 103,800 visitiors per day.

Some may argue that a commission of 15p per click is way too low but not all clicks result in sales and not all sales result in commission, there are time restrictions, did they click on another link that took them to the same site and some links may have minimum sales values.

Gambling links pay well because the profit margins for the gambling sites are huge but very few users of this site would click a gambling link, weight loss products are much less profitable so the commissions are much lower.

There is an online cycling shop that typically pays between £10 and £20 per sale, this sounds great but how many people will click on a link and then spend £1k - £2k on a bike almost there and then?