Mack On Baseball

As you now realize, my paid subscription site (http://mackonbaseball/ ) is now gone.


I asked the original administrator to take the site down. It was designed and developed by a kind man named John Strubel (http://www.johnstrubel.com/ ) , who also writes about the Mets. John did all the work free for me and turned the administrator role over to me when his work was completed.


He paid the first three months hosting fee to GoDaddy as paid the server he used for a year. Like I said, a kind man.


I contacted GoDaddy and paid a year in advance for their service, so I thought the site was now “mine”. I’m not a technical guy and I still don’t understand why I pay GoDaddy and still are on some other server, but we’ll get back to that in a few paragraphs.


I have been writing about the Mets online for seven years and I thought it was time to test the subscription waters. My old site (this one) was up to a PR4 status, I had made a bunch of loyal friends and followers, and all I was trying to do was raise enough money to pay for a health insurance policy for my wife.


I consulted Matt Cerrone with the idea and he thought it was premature. He suggested I set it up with a monthly fee of around $2, but I decided to do it yearly for the sum of $29 a year. My goal this year was to secure 100 subscribers. I thought that was a conservative goal.


I secured 10 subscribers since January. At the same time, WordPress reported that I averaged well over 1,000 different viewers a day. I’m not exactly sure what they were viewing since all the good stuff was protected by the site for subscribers only, but that’s what the numbers were. 10 subscribers, three of which I had to beg.


My intention was to continue, but I was having trouble getting online to the GoDaddy site. I contacted them by phone and they had problem identifying my account until they informed me that the site was still under the name of the original administrator and it was on his server. The GoDaddy rep explained to me that I could be dropped at any time by that server, and definitely would have been dropped after the first year John paid for.


I would have to find a new server to gain full control of the site and I determined that the cost of finding someone to do that for me was something I couldn’t move forward with. I was lucky to originally find John and moving forward would cost me bucks I don’t have.


I contacted John and asked him to remove me from the server, which he did. Trust me, if I had 100+ subscriptions, I would have tried to come up with a different solution.


That site was my fourth Mets site. There won’t be a fifth. I will feed this site until I pass. My hopes are still to make some ching doing this and I hope some other site, newspaper, network, platform, or alternate dimension contacts me some day and asks me to write for them.


I’m not sure of my direction here. Please feel free to suggest what you would like me to either write, post, or paste about,


Thanks to the ten of you that supported my efforts.