My motivation for my websites (catur chess portal, gilachess blogs, chess calendar, chess formatted results, tournament websites – DATMO,Johor Open, Penang Open) was to fill the personal need to document chess happenings around me.
However, over the years forgetting to pay renewal fees for webhosting and domain names resulted in losing many years of valuable (at least to me) content. For example I wanted to get back some old pictures of Siti Zulaikha since she won the recent Nationals, I was disappointed that a lot of the pictures was in the old GilaChess website which is now gone. 🙁
Since this is a hobbyist project, I do not make money out of providing services like advertising / promoting chess events, chess calendar, reporting chess results etc. By placing some ads in the websites, Google Adsense did help defray the costs of running the websites. It was enough to pay for webhosting and then some. However over the past years, Google has gotten ‘stingy’ and tightened their ads payments and the money has trickled down to pennies and since the pandemic, even stopped altogether.
Recently, with the increase of local chess activities, the old sites are reactivated again and I’ve even started several new chess projects, I am thinking of setting up a Patreon account for chess enthusiast who want to support my efforts.
This can help a long way by paying long term for example 2-3 years instead of currently paying monthly.
I have not done so previously because just like the picture above, I felt embarrassed because it’s like begging for donations.
It is painful to lose years of chess pictures and stories just for not paying webhosting fees in time, so I will swallow my pride and do a bit of begging :). In all probability Patreon may not be enough to pay for all this but there’s no harm in trying.