As for the AdSense / hosting costs...
How much data transfer do we have? - I remember it being something huge like 500GB a month, and we'd have to have quite a lot more visits to reach that (I'd be surprised if we're even near 10% of that at the moment.)
I think pushing the affiliate stuff is more likely to boost income than AdSense - how many people actually follow AdSense vs affiliate links?
Oh, can you see what they can do about upgrading us / moving to a new server as well?
Upgrading Apache, MySQL and PHP at least would be nice, but a whole new server that someone actually supports would be better. Something less archaic than Redhat 3AS, which not even Redhat support anymore it seems.
Matt, monthly, our sites average a couple thousand live body visitors, non bots or crawlers, the adsense haven't netted anything yet. We don't put them in the member areas, like forums, member pages, etc., just on main site pages. We get more from member donations.
We've been looking into some affiliate programs to use instead. Mostly credit cards, web hosting companies, financial institutions, insurance, damaged credit lending, gambling sites, and a few pay sites. These seem to be among the better payers.
We've also been checking the local area for businesses that might be interested in being sponsors, possibly for a banner in the rotations we run on the main sites.
If you like, I can send you a copy of the rotater. It's easy to set up and manage, and runs on php pages. If you want to use it on a html page, then you have to iframe it. Let me know if you want the rotater.
Also, we're sending you a little thank you for all the help you've been giving us at hof. You've been a true sweety. Thank you.
DP