Website provider: Pay or get out
Posted July 23, 2009
It’s official. The website address geocities.com/powerlinebaseball will no longer exist after October of this year – at least not for free.
Yahoo!, who owns the website provider Geocities, which has housed the Powerline Baseball League’s free website for more than five years, will end the free hosting service, they announced last month.
This means we will be searching for a new provider and host in the fall. Until then, nothing technically will change.
Yahoo! does offer a service for $4.99 per month to keep our site how it is in tact, minus the annoying right-hand ads. But after a year, they up the price big time. It’s an option for us, but there are better ones in terms of cost and having a domain name, too.
With a cost possibly now, do we consider reaching out to any business who might want to become the league’s website sponsor? The cost of such a sponsorship could be as low as just a couple hundred dollars if we just want it to cover the maintenance costs, or could include some additional money that could be shared amongst the teams for umpires or baseballs for example.
That is all up for debate, and doesn’t really matter unless we can get a sponsor or two.
The NCABL raises quite a bit of money by asking teams to find four small sponsors whose business cards appear on the schedule page. If you cannot find sponsors, you pay a website fee. A similar idea, on a smaller scale of course, could be used to post sponsors’ logos on the schedule, team and or blog pages of the PBL. Although I know finding sponsors for your team’s regular fees is tough enough so I’m not sure I like this model.
Feel free to share your initial thoughts and ideas on the future of the website and how it could possibly generate some revenue to help reduce costs to players on all teams. Or, if it should remain a site without ads, totally funded by the teams, which is fine, too.
I will keep you informed of further news regarding the site and the changes, and it will likely be a topic at the next meeting.
Posted on July 23, 2009 by Jason Buzzell
