White Wolf Enterprises has been operating for almost 9 years now. The company’s primary offering has been AMSOIL, available through http://whitewolflube.com. As I review business expenses, vendors, and survey my own systems infrastructure, I am reevaluating current tactics and looking beyond.
Costs
First and foremost, I realize that I pay others to provide many of the same services that I have learned and employed on more home-lab basis. Services such as email and web hosting come with rather exorbitant price tags, especially when you operate on yearly or monthly plans.
I already operate multiple servers and services for personal reasons so why not host my own business services? This allows me to redirect some of the previous expense funds into upkeep and upgrades of existing systems.
Up-time, Redundancy, and High-Availability
Up-time is always a concern for anyone that owns, manages, or benefits from a website. My ISP already provides a 99% (typically 99.9%) up-time so I feel fairly confident at this point. All my systems are supported by UPS systems and redundant power supplies so again, feeling confident. Thanks to ProxMox and having multiple servers, I have HA configured in-case any one server experiences a catastrophic failure… so for now at least, confident.
Initial changes
I already cancelled 3rd party web-site management and hosting and have started redirecting both web and email traffic to wwolf.us. Unfortunately, I have to wait for more contracts to expire before I feel significant financial relief from these moves.
I have re-engaged social marketing and invested in some advertising materials. This will be small improvements until I see what works and what does not.
(the) Beyond part…
I am exploring an e-commerce opportunity to operate in addition to my AMSOIL dealership and blog. Risks are higher and the venture requires some capital but who doesn’t want to be self-employed? Okay, I am sure there are many that do not. As for me, being self-managed and self-sustained financially speaking is extremely desirable. This is not a get-rich quick scheme but hopefully an opportunity to make my mark in business. If not, and best to do anyways, I can start reevaluating tactics again.
If you want to check it out, the website is shop.wwolf.us. THIS IS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS… please be gentle with any feedback 🙂
