I was thinking of registering some sort of whisky related domain name and putting up my own reviews and letting others put up their reviews. In addition, I would have an opt-in email list for sending out a newsletter maybe once per month, which would have a featured review or two.
Oh, and of course I would have a link to this newsgroup!
Anyway, I was going to use
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because they bundle both the Web hosting and their permission-based email marketing service called StreamSend
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Would people submit reviews? This would just be a hobby not really to make money. In the process I am sure I would learn a great deal about single-malt scotch, which I have to learn about fairly recently. You probably guessed that from the novice questions I ask in this group.
I think it is a nice idea and that if you have the will, time, and desire to make something out of it that it could develop nicely. As for the ezpublishing, I think what is being offered is fair for the price asked. That said, many many other hosts can offer something similar for the same price. I fail to see the added value of streamsend as compared to any other mailinglist software which others offer. I think the number of emails they allow (500, 1000, etc.) is on the low side. Others do not impose an email limit like that and instead allow you several gigabytes of traffic a month which could easily be used to send many times that number.
Most information is on the website but i called them last night to clarify some things. I think I am going to go ahead with the Value plan soon.
There StreamSend email marketing enables you to send out 4,000,000 emails/month though clearly you would have to upgrade above what are bundled with their web hosting packages. Here is the pricing info if you got just an email marketing account:
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Now, as for Web hosting, I am probably going to get the Value plan for $9.95/month, which bundles a 1 GB website hosting plan with a 500 emails/month StreamSend permission-based email marketing plan. That is perfect for starting out and I can upgrade later to the "Small Business" plan, which offers 1,000 emails/month in email marketing -- and their Enterprise plan which includes a 2,000 emails/month email marketing plan. If I want to go up higher than that it would be easy to just upgrade the StreamSend email marketing plan up to a higher plan as needed.
When I talked to them they said that they are now offering $25 in Google Adwords credit too. That would be very useful to get me started driving traffic to my site if I did end up selling any products from it or wanted to capture leads, etc. It is nice to know that is available if needed to get me started using Adwords.
For some time to come, though, what comes with the web hosting plans will be more than enough:
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In fact, I would imagine my idea will grow fairly slowly, so I don't really want to be spending more than $9.95/month for awhile anyway. But who knows maybe my site will someday be useful to people regarding Scotch Whisky!
So I am about to register the new domain name for the idea for the site and get started with the website. The hosting from EZ Publishing will be $9.95/month which is not bad at all.
EZ Publishing Small Business Web Hosting:
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The Value package includes a 500 emails/month StreamSend
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permission-based email marketing service, and now it looks like EZ publishing is now offering a free $25 Google Adwords credit so people can get started using Google Adwords:
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As I mentioned before I do have a day job, but wanted to have fun with a whisky related website...
I'm a bit late mentioning this, but I only heard about it a few days ago; did you consider setting up a Wikicity?
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It's free as far as I know. I don't know if it's what you are looking for, but it's very easy to have many of contributors write content and tasting notes. It's based on the same software as Wikipedia
But Dotster offers a fraction of the space and bandwidth for more money. A lot of companies, including Dotster and BlueDomino (formerly XO) are just not staying competitive in terms of what they offer. So unless you judge that they have a huge edge in reliability, they're poor buys.
I am happy with EZ Publishing because they offer more disk space then I can use, a 500 emails/month StreamSend email marketing account, and free $25 Google Adwords credits to get me started with that if I wanted to market the site online. They also have a content management system that makes it easy to manage my website. For $9.95/month this is a good value.
I use EZ Publishing for my business, and now I am going to use them for my whisky website. I am very excited about that.
They really helped me out a lot when I was just starting my business back in
1999 so I feel grateful to them. They designed me a website very inexpensively. The owner said they would do it because they wanted me as a long-term customer. Well, they got it and I also take the opportunity to recommend them when I can.
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