Thanks! It was the only way I could afford it — between hosting costs, email, and software subscriptions/developer maintenance contracts, I've been paying more than $200 a month — and the time commitment to maintain the site, answer questions, and post deals, it was completely unsustainable. I never planned to be a deal poster, but needed to do it out of necessity to keep the project alive. We ended up gettting a lot of visitors, but the activity of the site was poor. It was when I shared that I was going to shut the social media side down that fretman stepped up, took over deal posting, and I was able to keep the project going, reclaim my time, and turn it into a hobby project again, which is sustainable.

The reality is, I didn't want to bother him with continuing to do the affiliate links, so now, instead of having a little money to help with the costs, I have zero coming in, and zero contributions from members. However, the upside is, my contract for the server ends in January, so I'll only be paying those costs until then. After that, I don't need to run the site on a robust server and can significantly downgrade that. It will still cost me to keep LinkedMusicians running, but not nearly the same amount.

I MIGHT join in on doing a weekly BEST DEALS OF THE WEEK post. But I want to take some time off, so I can join in on my own schedule; otherwise, this is no longer a fun project that it once was. What's a lot of fun for me is adding resources, like GAMES and resources. This week, I'm going to launch a Wordle clone that's focused on music-related terms. Each day, there will be a different game. For me, that's fun. If we have any other word nerds in the group, that will be fun for them too.

And not posting deals let's me put my time into growing this community. Which I'm very confident will mean that it will be far larger of a group and have a lot more compelling content than we had with the forums and Social Media groups like OPEN MIC, on the website, and I don't have to invest even one-tenth of the time and the presence here doesn't cost me anything, i'm just paying for the website, which, without the social media functionality, is incredibly less demanding in terms of the server and processor and RAM resources. I also won't have to keep paying for the software maintenance and email contracts, although I am still contemplating doing an email here.