when she first opened her site she had something up about people giving her feedback for her site since it was brand new and she was new to this, so I emailed her and gave her some suggestions about the use of dark purple font and black background (like anyone could read it) and various other things all i got for a response was "thanks, the site is still a work in progress check it out again" then the next time I checked out the site (like 2 weeks later i think) it was a pay site and she was emailing me her updates along with anybody else who has ever emailed her (like i needed to know she added one outfit this week and then get to her site to see the pic is too dark to tell what it looks like but its $3 to download it lol)
So I emailed her after getting several of those updates ("no ones visiting or buying anything! please buy something!")
[removed what I already explained above]
The price per outfit is pretty high compared to other pay sites...$1.50 or more per outfit? When you can get a month-long subscription to simultaneous design, simchic, sims2luxe, or simsconnection for $5...Honestly, if I were going to spend money on a pay site, it would be for one of them, not only do they have lots of stuff, but they have some quality items there, and I can download as much as I want while I have the subscription and its cheaper (than your site)...they get insane amounts of visitors per month...they use the donations to pay for their hosting/server fees, and whatever is extra is profit....Your cost per month is 3xs that amount....and you're on free hosting (based on your domain name--if it were pay you wouldnt have to include their name in your url) so you can't even guarantee that if anyone pays the $15 for a month subscription to your site that they will get to use it because your site could be down with a "bandwidth exceeded" message at any point in time. Obviously you're doing the whole pay thing to make money because my (free) site's hosting is about $15 a month and I don't even use 10% of my hosting plan!
You'd probably make more money if you switched to pay hosting, found a good website layout (there are tons of free templates out there), and lowered the monthly donation price....and explain to people why they should pay for 1 month of your site when they could instead pay for more than sub to another site (or something unrelated to the game)...a "why donate" page like most other pay sites have.
Anyways I just wanted to let you know why I am not going to be going to your site so there is no point in sending me updates I didn't ask for. So please remove me from the list of people you send these email updates to.
Of course I was trying to be nice and make suggestions for improvement, not trying to attack her (I'm sure people could say the same bad things about the stuff I make lol but then again my site is entirely free and we've gotten enough voluntary donations to pay for almost a whole year of hosting lol)....Her response:
My site hosting isn't free. I'm glad you brought that point up because I will call them and ask them to drop their name from my site since I'm paying good money for it to keep the pop ups and free ads off.
I have removed you from the mailing list so you will not receive anymore.
Thankfully she stopped filling up my inbox with her "updates", unfortunately I think she lied about the other part...even if she is paying them for hosting, their most expensive hosting plan is $15 a month (the same price as her monthly subscription fee for her site) and none of her domains would have "netfirms" in the url, yet all of them do.