So am I right to say that on months that you make less than $840 from ads, you are suffering losses since the server cost is $840/mth?
RARE PR5, Alexa 4150, DMOZ listed, 5 years old, 25K users, fully custom coded, high traffic leading image host
Many add ons and unique feature, market brand leader
http://xs.to/
Closed
This listing ended without a winner.
- Bid History:
- 3 Bids (0 Pending)
- Offer History:
- None accepted (0 Pending)
- Listed:
- Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:13:36 GMT
Accepted Payment Methods: Electronic Transfer, Escrow.com
Description
This sale is really a once in a lifetime opportunity and I really hate being forced to sell my prize winning site.
The site has Alexa 4150, Dmoz listed, dozens of thousands of back links and high traffic.
To get a feel for our traffic and value check out cubestat summary:
http://tinyurl.com/6gn9ky
Check out our Alexa - it had been high for years:
http://tinyurl.com/6ngrw3
I bought this site about 6 months ago and since then have been working night and day to re-code and re-build it and it shows in the traffic growth we had.
I've added more machines, features, coded a fully working windows screen capture tool for it along with a slideshow generator (worth thousands of $$$-s - you can see similar tools were sold here without any site or traffic for over 5K$) and invested thousands in development, design, coding and server optimizations.
This site is without doubt a rare gem and you don't see many of those on sale here. This sale is meant for serious buyers with good linux and site management knowledge, it's not for newbies as this is a high profile, high traffic site that requires skill and know-how.
You will need to know mysql, php, some windows code basics (C#) and nginxm bind and other linux services.
Why is it so special?
1. The site is over 5 years old, our alexa had been high for years - it's not a "quick boosted" site but a really stable, heavy and known brand name site.
2. Site is fully custom coded. There is nothing like it out there and it works very similar to the way imageshack works in terms of distributing load and adding machines.
The code includes:
Multiple server support, slideshow generator, a windows screenshot tool that takes snapshots directly to the site (!) and copies a link to the clipboard on the fly, image Galleries/albums, image management and lots more.
Site was coded constantly over the past years and thousands of human hours were put into it. It uses latest php/mysql and runs on a pre-compiled php5 with nginx engine that can handle thousands of concurrent users easily.
3. Full admin control panel - see latest uploads, ban users, delete files, see latest screen shots and more.
4. The domain is premium and unique (2 letters) - x s . t o and is well known and well branded. (pronounced as "access to").
5. Site hosts over 3.5 million images, has over 25K registered and validated users and gets 30K-50K unique new visitors a day!
You can easily convert that to emails, money or ads by doing some aggressive changes to the site functions.
6. SEO wise the site is in the top 5-10 for most keywords (free image hosting, image hosting and many others) and gets a lot of traffic daily.
7. Currently Alexa is 4150 and climbing down (more traffic) as we did a major re-build of the site and completely changed the back engine.
Stats are attached in a full report so you can review them and had been stable for months/years.
8. The site has a licensed version of adpeeps ad management system integrated into it allowing you to control ads on the site (which country sees what, limit exposures, dates, sell ads, see reports and lots more).
Reason for selling:
I'm forced to sell because a financial crisis I'm in. I would have never EVER let this one go as this is truly a winning ticket
to success and richness.
Technical info and requirements:
The site currently runs on 4 dedicated machines at FDC servers on a 100mb unmetered shared connection.
Each server pulls in an average of 15-18TB of traffic a months so FDC really do give a more then the money's worth for what we are paying (total server cost is 2x160$ and 2x260$).
The servers are debian linux with latest Nginx as a web server along with custom compiled php5 , fastcgi and fpm-cgi that manages the process.
A full criss-cross backup and self healing script mechanism is in place to ensure backups, uptime and stability. This took months to perfect and find tune.
You may take ownership of my servers or you can move the site to any server you want but take into account that you need 60-70TB of BW and at least 500gb of disk space + proper backup and CPU of course.
Revenue Details
We really aren't that good in monetizing this site I'm afraid so the site makes anything from 600$ to 1200$ a month depending on ads and traffic it really varies (i.e. if you use popups or not).
We do allow hotlinks which we estimate brings in about 200K uniques a day which are not counted for. You can always block or redirect that and get that traffic into cash
if you want (we didn't want to do that just yet).
We use Adsense, DSNR, CPX Interactive, Global Interactive and others (we also had been accepted to Tribal fusion CPA for example).
With this traffic you can get into any advertiser you want easily as it gives out amazing exposure.
Traffic Details
Site gets 20K-50K uniques a day in average (and about 200K more that are hotlinking) steadily and for years.
Traffic had grown in about 6-7% in the last 2 months
following our engine and seo changes. Traffic is mostly from other sites, we didn't do ANY advertising although we do have some agreements in place with image related sites that
we reffer to and they reffer back to us in return. SE traffic is also high and traffic is mostly US, Canda, Japan and Europe.
At any given moment there are 8000-10000 connections opened on our web engine (!).
Questions 8 public, 0 deleted
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:15:47 GMT
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:22:53 GMT
Hi,
Yes you are right. There are months when I don't cover server costs but.... I do this anyway as this site is growing and will eventually be one of the top 2-4 image hosts on the globe. As far as I know other then Imageshack and us - no one has the back end abilities to support massive hits and growth - that will allow the owner to multiply traffic and turn revenues around easily.Also - we made a test with Yes Advertising for popups and we got 5$ for 1K pop ups - meaning if you do take that line of action you can make pretty nice cash. We hate these and they are sometimes carrying spyware so we decided to avoid them.
Any good marketeer can EASILY milk 2-3K$ a month out of this site as this traffic and user base is a gold mine. We NEVER mailed the users and even if you just do a newsletter and sell ad spots you will 10x the rev.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:25:11 GMT
More answers following PM questions:
1. We get 8500-14000 new images uploaded a day.
2. Non-viewing traffic is 20K-50K uniques a day (we don't count direct links at all!).
3. We get 20-100 new members a day verified a day.
4. We have about 15K non-verified members on top of the 25K verified ones (totals to 40K users). -
- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:39:09 GMT
http://www.free-image-hosting.us/ is included? are there more domains in use?
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:16:23 GMT
Yes! That domain is included (Sorry I totally forgot to mention it).
No other domains are included.xs.to is registered in the original .to registrar (hence the extra 100$ for moving it) and the .us domain is registered at Godaddy (free push).
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:41:38 GMT
Do you have a reserve or a B.I.N in mind? If so please either PM me with that info or post it on here.
Thanks
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:10:32 GMT
Hi,
There's no BIN in mind but feel free to pm me an offer and if it's good we might go ahead and close the sale early. -
- Posted by:
- Date:
- Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:33:52 GMT
Update:
We had fixed a HD issue we had on one of our machines and average pictures per day had now rocketed to 15,500 images uploaded a day (see updated admin back end screen shot). Alexa also bumped up to 4050 Today!
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