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Happy 4th of July! Sometime in the spring of 2023 I decided to make the switch and start from scratch. I was having issues with my prior website mikecalabrese.xyz and either could not get through to my previous web hosting provider to get them fixed or was told that they didn’t know the solution and to keep calling back and hopefully, someone would answer the phone that could help. These issues included a misconfigured SSL certificate and bouncing emails from my domain.
Since I was paying $100 a year for SSL, I wanted something that worked. The SSL did not work at the top level of my domain. However, if you landed on a secondary page of the site, then navigated to the top level, it would work. I actually had an advertiser tell me that they would not approve me because my site wasn’t secure. It was secure but it wasn’t properly configured.
As for the bouncing emails, I found out on my own that spammers were buying .xyz domains because they were cheap. They would then send out massive amounts of spam from these domains. It got so bad that some email relay server admins were actually blocking email from .xyz domains. They tried to filter these emails but unfortionately, my emails got caught up in this mess.
So on July 31, 2023 I went looking for a new domain. I planned to start from scratch. Just for the heck of it, I searched for the domain that I had from 1999 to 2010, mikecalabrese.com . I gave up mikecalabrese.com in 2010 due to financial issues. I couldn’t believe it but it was again available. So I bought it again. As for the hosting I didn’t want to stay with “GD”. So I did some research and went with my present provider Bluehost. I opted to use a WordPress platform this time versus a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) site like I had before because I had created a few web sites for some non profits using WordPress and found it easy to work with.
I spent the next 6 months migrating the majority of the content and advertisers that I had from mikecalabrese.xyz to mikecalabrese.com . During that time I did minimal maintenance to mikecalabrese.xyz. Then, on January 12, 2024, the transition was complete and I sunsetted mikecalabrese.xyz. I prepaid the hosting for mikecalabrese.com for 3 years. Year 1 is coming to a close.
Support has been very good with Bluehost so far. The site uptime has been around 99%, my support calls have been answered promptly and any issues have been solved. I have learned a lot by having this site and I think that this keeps my brain working since I am officially an old fart now.
What does the future hold for mikecalabrese.com? I have two years left on my prepayment of this site. I’ve overcome some technical obsticles and have learned a lot. I think the site looks OK. I have somewhere around 275 to 300 advertisers. I am getting some good “free stuff” that I do product evaluations on. As for the sales, they could always be better.
In my opinion, it seems that the most successful affiliate publishers, those that advertise products and services on their websites, emails, social media platforms, etc are getting the most sales. These “influencers” have been making very good sales. However, in order to get those sales, they must spend massive amounts of time on these platforms promoting themselves. I would personally like to spend more time outdoors and less time online. So it looks like I will never make millions online.
This site will be here at least through July 31, 2026. After that, who knows. I may renew the site, I may shut it down. At this point I’m undecided. Some days doing this is fun. Some days it is a challenging but also a learning experience and some days it is a PIA. Hopefully, some people have enjoyed reading about my outdoor adventures. And maybe they will actually buy something from the ad banners, text ads and store product placements on it. Maybe?
Mike C
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