I think the use of adverts in the museum and forums would make it more sustainable with a running fund-raiser for a pro to have a look at optimising the site like Druid suggests, i'm too knackered at the moment to think of any other suggestions. Moving the servers away from the US would also seem like a good idea hassle wise in the long run as well. Also I don't think PHP is going anywhere ether, but things like java, flash ect (client side nonsense) would definitely be a bad idea. Though I struggle to think what you'd need server side code for in a 'museum' website anyway unless you're angling for user generated content/input which I don't imagine you are. If you're looking to have a few trustees update and augment the information stored there then a simple PHP back end (to edit the html museum front end) would do the trick I imagine. Though again, I'm knackered so pardon my ignorance if I've missed the point here.
The ads are part of my plan. I won't be around forever. The site will eventually go non-profit and it needs about $15,000 in a trust to perpetually insure the site exists.
Perhaps useful ads related to gaming or other things? I fequently see ads to games and stuff on Amazon on many gaming sites I visit. And I find it actually not all that invasive since it's relevant to the site and my interests. Support the site/museum by supporting games as a whole? I dunno. I don't know much about this kind of stuff so i'm drawing a big blank other than this.
If we use google ads, the content will depend on the user, right? I'm thinking of the modern "smart" ads. The other day I was looking at a new CPU (an old model) for a box that Tiger Direct still had in stock. I bookmarked the page and just recently I have gotten Tiger Direct ads, and even Tiger Direct ads that feature that exact product. I even had a YouTube ad for TD that said, "Check out these items you may enjoy!" and that CPU popped up in the video ad. Scared the crap out of me for a second until I remembered how advanced ads are getting these days.
You could highlight the entire gaming internet landscape with ads laced throughout the museum. For example, in the section for gameboy, you could have ads for the small online enterprises that sell modernized and rebuilt gameboys and beyond that, ads for websites and forums devoted to Gameboy. This could be done through all hardware categories, essentially encapsulating the gaming internet landscape with a central portal of sorts. Also the big boys could be brought in. Sega ads in the Sega section, Nintendo, Sony...... So the ads would be extremely relevant to the areas of the virtual museum. So, this way the ads themselves become less spam and more or less extensions of the theme. Edit: As a twist, you could charge a load of money for Sega to display its ads in the Nintendo section. You could ignite a sort of Advertising wars pitting console manufactures against one another. It could be entertaining.
hmmm, then I'd start hammering the ads into the site ASAP and bank the profit, maybe open a fundraiser so that users can donate towards this goal and you'll probably have to look into e-commerce trading equipment somewhere (amazon/ebay?) last I looked you have a good grasp of what equipment to buy and when to sell, also look into search engine optimisation to bring in more traffic for the ads. It would take a while on ads and donations alone but it's a start. I do understand where Vosse is coming from but in order to make more money you will probably have to consider more than just game targeted adverts since it's going to be the sites main source of revenue. In the mean time shopping around for a decent off shore host who can provide security for the museum so it doesn't get raped by the feds and the DMCA at any point. Though in the long run you must realise that political landscapes change meaning wherever you pick won't be safe forever.
Have you thought about trying to work with a University? They have serious bandwidth and and a school that does Game/Development as part of its curriculum might be very interested in preserving gaming history. you'd have to start straight out as a non-profit but you wouldn't have to worry about the material vanishing as most schools tend to hang on to things forever. If you have an interest in this route let me know as I may have a couple contacts for you.
Due to the plain old HTML idea, it might be cheaper to just run the museum on another server that's low cost. Depending how much space it requires though. Do you have an estimate?
Derailing the thread? hardly. The root issue is the bandwidth usage. If you do not want to address that and just want to make enough to cover inefficient usage - then you are making life harder for yourself than it needs to be. However, lesson learned - wont bother in future!
Reconsider html only approach, it would be tiresome to update the museum, add or correct. A simply php script would be nice, nothing fancy like a full scale cms. Donations and some google ads might do in long term but i would consider also some ad space selling approach or sponsors. Finally spam the hell out on "social" media to get some buzz.
Honestly why not host it yourself? decent last generation servers can be had for a few hundred bucks. You can host it on a non static ip address if you use no-ip's dynamic dns service. You effectively have no bandwidth limits at that point. As far as ads, look into google ad sense. they are one of the least intrusive.
Im not really sure how you expect to get some good advice then? for all we know you could be using 100gb a month and think that's a lot... Look in to www.cloudflare.com, its a content distribution network that will mirror your site around the world, think of it as like a proxy for your website. Users > cloudflare server closest to them > your website It also acts as an additional layer of security to your website, the only way to connect to the servers running my website is through cloudflare, only selected ip addresses have direct access to the server. It can also greatly reduce bandwidth usage as your content (such as images) are cached on cloudflares servers. In the last 30 days cloudflare has served 1.2tb of cached data for my site, a great reduction.
