Time flies.

For those unaware of how websites work, here’s a quick rundown of what goes into owning a website.  The first part is the name itself.  This is the cheapest bit as it’s about $15 a year, including privacy protection.  After that, you need to find a place to host the site.  This is where it gets a lot more complicated, as there are myriad options out there, from free hosting to paying thousands a year, depending on what your needs are.  For the record, we pay so much for the physical system the website is kept on (basically a computer whose only purpose is to run the website) and so much again for the software used to manage all the behind the scenes stuff. The option we use isn’t cheap, as we need certain protections against people trying to attack us and get the site shut down.  We’re also able to host everything ourselves, right down to the images and videos we use.  That means we’re completely in control of all our own content.

Anyway, yesterday I had to renew the names part.  We own several site names.  Some are sites in their own right, while some are “redirects”, which come back to a page on scamsurvivors.com when you type its name in.  Names are paid for by the year, and a quick check showed that both scamsurvivors.com and stupidscammers.com will be 6 years old this month, while blackmailscams.com will reach its 4th birthday about 2 weeks earlier.  In that time, there’s been over 150,000 posts on our forum, over 20,000 blackmail forms filled in and millions of pairs of eyes checking out our sites and hopefully protecting themselves from being scammed.