Two years and still kicking

By: L33tdawg

Yes. This is yet another L33tdawg looking nostalgically back on the year gone by and giving you guys a run down of the good the bad and the ugly that HITB went through during the last 12 months. If you didn’t realize it, Issue #25 marks our 2nd anniversary since the conception of HITB, which 2 years ago, was then nothing more than a glorified personal homepage – you can read it all in A year in the box. But let’s focus on 2001 – a year I believed would be good for us, and in some ways it was…

I think the two major set backs we had last year was losing our hosting provider, and almost having to shut down. When Uberfusion (our hosting provider), got pissed that their network was getting probed, DoSed and had god only knows what else thrown their way they pretty much told us to bugger off cause we were encroaching on their bandwidth and not to mention limiting their productivity (due to the denial of service downtimes and such). So we were faced with 2 options – either move the box to DataOne (a hosting outfit here in Malaysia) and pay about USD200 per month for bandwidth, or get our own bandwidth in and host the box in house.

Certainly the first option was the cheapest, but due to the fact that the box that runs this site is also used for our research and development work, it was just not feasible for us to have the box hosted in DataOne. When we had it over at Uberfusion, it was only a matter of giving them a call every time the box crashed or didn’t come back up after a reboot. I doubt DataOne would have been too obliging to walk over and reboot the box every couple of weeks, so we were left looking to get our own bandwidth in and host the box where I could keep an eye on it.

The first problem with this was cost. Initially, I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to sell off banner ads to help subsidies the per-month payments for the DSL line, but this proved harder than it sounded. Firstly, the dot-com crash made life really difficult for any site looking to generate revenue from an online only advertising model. This was further compounded by the fact that I lost my editorial post at PC.com (a local IT magazine) so I was left pretty much without income and having to rely on savings to see to things. Back to the ads though. We started off offering ads for sale at USD150 per month for equal rotation amongst all ads in the system, but everyone was saying it was too much to pay for a banner ad – disregard the fact that we get somewhere close to 1.5 million hits per month at 120-150K page views, it seems that USD150 is just too pricey. Fair enough, we dropped the prices to a measly USD50 per month (which works out to less than a dollar a day really) and still nobody wanted ads. Just when we were about to give up hope and resign ourselves to the fact that we were most likely going to have to pull the plug on the box and be done with it, a couple of people came forward to offering to buy some of our ad revenue. In addition, we managed to downgrade our line to one IP which reduced our per month overhead to about ½ the current price. So after the fat trimming and the sale of a few ads, plus me getting a couple of projects, it looks like the worst is over and we’ll still be in business for at least another 6 – 12 months, if not longer. *grin*!

I think looking back now, being faced with the prospect of perhaps having to shut down was a good thing. It at least proved that there are people out there who appreciate what we’re doing and the human race is still willing to lend a helping hand to those in need. Certainly gives you a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside. What’s the moral of the story you ask? Don’t try and run a non-profit site and make up your losses with ads. It won’t work – if it’s non profit, expect to pay for most things out of your own pocket, and perhaps only realize that ads will help subsidies your sites expenditure – but it certainly won’t be enough to cover everything.

The best part of 2001? Finally managing to upgrade the box. From running it on an AMD K6-2 300 MHz machine with a paltry 128MB of RAM, biatch0 was once again kind enough to donate hardware to us in the form of an AMD Athlon 1.2GHz proc and 384MB of RAM. He has since provided us with more hardware in the form of another 256MB of RAM and a 1.7GHz Athlon XP proc. Yet more proof that there are still people who believe in us… Heck, you’re here reading this aren’t you, so that should say a lot in itself. Funny how through the hard work of everyone involved with HITB, we’ve managed to put this site on the map. For sure we’re nowhere near to the big boys like Slashdot or Security Focus, but we’re getting there – and with the help of YOU sitting behind that machine, hopefully we’ll get there a little quicker.

So here’s a big thank you to everyone who sent us e-mails telling us how much they liked the site, to those who came forward offering their help and expertise during our time of need. An especially big thanks to you, the reader, for visiting and making the long hours that we put into HITB well worth the effort.

Warmest regards,
L33tdawg (on behalf of the HITB Team).

1.) Design Concept for a Strictly Anomally Based Web Intrusion Detection System - spoonfork
2.) The 2nd Annual 20 Worst People, Places and Things on the Internet 2001 - Archfiend
3.) NetStat - An overlook at market locked out commands - Kn¿ght
4.) The Acorn PC - logik
5.) The new iMac: Symbolic of what is wrong in technology - Dietcoke
6.) Interview: The Womb - A digital rebirth of sound - L33tdawg
7.) Review: Return to Castle Wolfenstein - L33tdawg
8.) Two years and still kicking - L33tdawg
9.) Of broadband gimmicks and the like - biatch0
10.) The Real McCoy - Dinesh Nair