Selling Web hosting comparison site, established 2004, PR2 with traffic/revenue, 100% custom

Background
Launched in October 2004, this site originally it offered discounts on hosting; I would give buyers 40% off the hosting plan they chose by splitting my CJ affiliate commission with them. I had several months where the site did $200-$400 in commissions; unfortunately the CJ reporting console only allows me to go back to 2009 so I can’t screenshot commissions prior to that. Anyway, things worked out well for years until CJ flagged the site as an incentive web site; after that a lot of the hosting advertisers ended their relationship with me. When the money stopped rolling in I lost interest, and left the site sitting pretty much dead for many years. Check out http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20080201065115/http://www.webhostingdiscounts.net/ if you care to see what the site looked like from 2004 onward.

Fast forward to June 2010, I hired a developer on eLance to completely rebuild the site. The new site is 100% custom, no templates or scripts were used. I wrote the specs and designs and he built it, it took us a couple months to get it the way I wanted it. Total cost to build it was $1,010 and have the receipts to prove it. It’s pretty slick, the comparison grid is a Flash piece, and there’s a web interface that lets you manage the backend database that the Flash piece pulls from. Via the interface you enter all the hosting plan details for each company, and input the tracked CJ image and destination URLs. When the site loads, a page view is fired for all the CJ publishers listed in the grid, and when a specific host is clicked the tracked CJ URL fires. The CJ portion works perfectly, I have had many sales, everything tracks properly. By the way, when I rebuilt the site I spoke to my CJ rep and made it clear that the site is NOT incentive-based anymore and they happily removed that flag from my CJ account; I then reapplied to every single hosting advertiser and got accepted by all of them.

Traffic
Organic search traffic has been a primary traffic source for the site’s entire life. Both sites (old and new) were SEO optimized and have consistently pulled in traffic. The site also receives steady traffic from numerous high-quality backlinks from web hosting sites, most of which linked to it based on web hosting articles I wrote and published on those sites. The site was formerly #1 for the term “web hosting discounts” on Google, first page for “discount web hosting” and “hosting discounts”, etc. but the rankings have slid as I haven’t had time to stay on top of the SEO work. For a 1-year period the site was a PR5 and has settled to the PR2 that it is now.

Revenue
For many years revenue came from CJ and AdSense as well as link sales, but now it is CJ-only. Since rebuilding the site in June 2010 it has brought in $316.50 in CJ commissions.

The site is coded in PHP and has a MySQL backend; everything is extremely easy to manage, frankly there’s not much to the site, the list of files is minimal.

Domain is registered with GoDaddy and is included with the sale. Reserve price is reasonable considering the age of the domain, the fact that it’s a PR2, the backlinks and consistent traffic it has received for nearly 7 years as well as its revenue potential. With proper promotion and SEO work this site should be a good earner for the right buyer, although the web hosting space is very competitive. This is not some “template sale” where I’m going to sell this site and 10 other clones; if the reserve is met I’m selling this site and calling it quits, you won’t have to worry about seeing 10 clones popping up a month from now.

I have a very demanding career and simply have not been able to keep up with the site, hence why I am selling it. Please post questions here or PM me and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for looking. I’m a long time DPer so bid with confidence.

 

Correction, site is coded in PHP and Flash has a MySQL backend, sorry I left Flash out in the description.

 

Its because of the flash that the site is not getting good SE rankings.

 

I have been an SEO for 11 years so I agree with you somewhat, but as you can see I added text in the footer so there is some on-page content. When I launched the Flash site the organic rankings were very high for 6-7 months, they only fell recently. I attribute this more to the fact that web hosting companies spend a lot on SEO and simply surpassed my rankings, as I have not been keeping up with SEO at all. When I was the site was ranked top 3 for most keywords. With a good backlinking campaign, the fact that the site is Flash will not make much of a difference, the rankings will rise regardless. I have SEO optimized dozens of Flash sites; they are harder to get good rankings for, but it is doable.

 

I am intersted. What is your expectation?

 

Ideally I'd like to at least recoup the cost to build the site ($1,000) but we'll see how it goes.