[partyatmygaff]

Well there's quite a few reasons why the model I had planned went south...

1. Serious funding issues.
2. Constant hacking attempts
3. HTC had began sending C&D letters to sites hosting ROMs containing copyrighted HTC software.

http://mobilitydigest.com/smartroms-project-abandoned/

That pretty much sums up why the project in it's original form was abandoned.

Here's a transcript of the comment I made on which that blog post was made since the blog post does have a few tabloid like lies in it.

Well it was a mixture of both serious funding issues and the fact the site was being targeted by hackers.

Earlier today three of the servers were attacked. The main site server serving the dynamic content. The static content server serving images and static files such as the images and CSS templates and finally the server dedicated to hosting the ROMs for Android. This came only two days after an attack on the main site's server last monday forcing me to have to go down to the datacenter to repair the damage done whicih left the site down for almost 24 hours. It's obvious there was someone out from the get go trying to destroy my site. I had no idea as to why this was happening nor as to who was responsible for them.

That and the fact that the advertising revenue did not even nearly cover operating costs of the servers. To give you an idea of how my costs are like...

I am charged for bandwidth on an ongoing basis, there is no monthly allowance as such.
Combined network speed of the ROM hosting infrastructure was about 1 gigabit or 100 MB. That pretty much guaranteed brilliant hosting speeds for anyone within the US or Europe but of course it came at a cost, a not so pretty cost at that

All in all I was paying about €1 per GB effectively. Today upon reviewing my log files and monitoring services I found that I had accrued a bill north of €100 within 24 hours. That was largely due to the fact one of the most popular HTC Sapphire developers hosted their ROM on the site. Around 4PM today I had nearly two accounts being created per minute on the site and in four hours the amount of users on my site grew from a mere 33 to 216. The problem was that my advertising revenue was shockingly inadequate in covering the costs I faced. I cannot give you my exact revenue figures as per Adsense TOS but they did not even cover 3% of my costs for today.

So that's a 97% loss in the first day. The site wasn't a business and it's aim was not to make profit but few people can afford running a site that makes such a massive operating loss.

I have not however given up on the project as a whole. I plan to relaunch the site sometime in the future as a true centralised database for custom ROM with bittorrent distribution as it's distribution system but for the time being I cannot give you an exact date on when it shall be ready for release.

So to summarise:
1. The site was not financially feasible
2. Incessant hacking attempts
3. A new idea is in development with an unknown release date.

Any more questions, feel free to ask.

So in short, the project has been suspended for the moment until I can finish work on the new site model.

[Inquitus]

Sorry to hear that Partyatmygaff. I would imagine ad revenues on sites like that where only the very tech savvy are likely to visit is always going to be quite minimal. People will mostly have adblocking in their browsers I would imagine.