To FHG on not to FHG?

[Xstr8guy]

Jim,

I dunno about MPA3, but NATS can seamlessly handle CCBill affiliate codes.

It's very slightly more work, but if you've got someone in the US that can set up a US-based business bank account, even simpler is to set up an account with myezbills.com, and then you can take the payout report generated by NATS (and presumably MPA3), import it into myezbills, and they will automatically cut and mail checks to your affiliates for you. The service costs about $13/month for 25 payments, and 50 cents or so per payment after that. It will also receive, scan, and store (and autopay, if you wish) any invoices that you currently receive in the mail.

Bank of America offers a similar service that interfaces with Quickbooks, which would allow you to do the same thing, and i think that service is free.

It's still more work than having CCBill do everything, but the ability to use a sophisticated tool like NATS or MPA3 might make it worthwhile.

I am still nervous about MPA3 provided for free with Epoch because I don't like the notion of being locked into one biller in first position, it sort of defeats the purposes of cascading billing and spreading your risk.


Hope that helps.

Thanks Chip! I didn't even know that was an option to have someone handle the accounts payable for you. That is something definitely worth investigating.

Now, how about the other part of the question. What kind of bandwidth would I need to serve these FHGs. I certainly would need another dedicated box for the FHGs, right? Right now UKNM is running on a 30mbps box and it seems like we will need to keep upgrading that every month or 2 as the site grows. Are FHGs (movie and photo) going to need a second box in that Mbps range?

[Lee]

Are FHGs (movie and photo) going to need a second box in that Mbps range?

Again, its going to depend on WHO is using your FHGs.

TGP owners putting your FHGs in a rotation is going to use a lot more bandwidth than a regular affiliate linking to them on their directories or free sites.

Also its going to depend on how graphically intense your FHGs are, what size images, movies, banners, etc you use.

Id start out with a basic dedicated hosting plan for a few months and go from there, no point in getting a bigger box/pipe if you arent going to realize its potential.

In addition, are FHGs actually going to be a benefit to you? I know people who have launched FHGs for their program and the bandwidth costs of having them far outweighed the sales revenues they generated, you also have to look at branding and over-exposure by having FHGs as part of a program in addition to design concepts.

Regards,

Lee