I was reading this thread and I know several Dopers have their own websites.
For those that do:
I keep thinking I would like to have a site, but can’t think of anything worth sharing (not that that hasn’t stopped thousands of people :D).
Maintain 3 at the moment.
The first:
The second:
The third:
I don’t actually have a web site per se, but a friend that owns and operates a huge datacenter gave me a colocated Linux box to play with. So long as I don’t create a blip on the bandwidth meter, I can play all I want. I’m learning now how to VPN to the one of the IP addresses in the subnet (alas, only 8 addresses) he gave me and use it as my public IP address. I’ve used it to seed torrents from time to time; the 3Gbit pipe he’s got makes for some fast uploads. 
http://my.tbaytel.net/culpeper/
1. Why do you have it? (business? hobby-related?) Hobby at this point. Mostly wilderness paddling articles and photos – some reprints and some not published.
2. How much time do you spend maintaining it (assuming you do it yourself)? Very little.
3. What reactions do you get (if any)? Nice comments and requests for information a few times per month.
4. Has your site ever been hacked? No.
B. Personal site: Flippancy, Sentimentality, Sarcasm, Camp, and Smut
A personal one, which basically I use for hosting files too big to send to Hotmail accounts etc. I use the email address as my main one, though.
One for a museum where I’m a volunteer, and where nobody else has a clue. It’s still in the latter part of the ‘setting up’ stage, so there’s plenty of ongoing work. I’ve had some good responses from related websites where I’ve offered link-exchanges, and quite a few click-throughs from local tourism sites.
Both are with a decent hosting service, and nobody’s tried hacking them (although they haven’t had long to try).
Business. I’m a composer/pianist, and it’s been an invaluable tool for promoting my music and allowing people from all over the world to listen and purchase it.
At this point I do it all myself. It took awhile to get everything on there, but now all I have to do is add new songs every once in a while and update the calendar, which doesn’t take very long at all.
I’m told it’s laid out pretty well; no complaints so far.
Nope.
I’ve had one for about … damn, 9 years. Now I feel old. ANyway it’s just my genealogy. Nothing too special.
Oops. Umm Last updated in 2003 (not much new stuff since then). I’ve helped some people. Confused several back when I first started and was pretty bad at it. Nope, why would anyone bother. I doubt I get more then a dozen visits a year.
) It doesn’t really need much maintainence.::sound of crickets::
Yeah…
Here’s mine.
[ol]
[li]Mine’s a “Namesake” type site, done as a hobby. (There goes my anonymity!) I used to maintain work-related sites as well, when I was working.[/li][li]Very little time spent updating now. Several hours per day when first building it.[/li][li]Maybe a dozen individual surfers on a typical day, but they typically don’t look at the whole site. I have a “Feedback Form” which gives me one or two responses per week. Biggest reaction was when it was linked to by Minnesota Public Radio when I had several hunderd hits per day for a week.[/li][li]Not hacked yet, touch wood.[/li][/ol]
Only ones hosted by Geocities and Trupod, 'less I get up enough dosh to go full domain etc.
Started the first as a vanity muck-around site, but my historical research and articlesswamped it, spilled over into another site, then evolved into one for my local historical society. I don’t maintain them enough, but should shortly get the time to do so. I’ve had loads of email response to them, from all around the country and the world (mainly genealogical enquiries).
Two others are more “I’ll put this online 'cause I feel like it” sites.
It was part of a Web site I created for the UB School of Architecture and Planning in 1994. I completed grad school in 1996, but the site was still hosted at UB until 1999.
Yes, the site really is going on 11 years. I maintain it as both a hobby and as a pro bono service to my chosen profession.
Kind of - I used to have a couple Angel Fire pages just for learning perhaps. Mostly, I learned really bad stuff, but that was the fun of it. Frames, tables, blinky text, etc. Well, I did do one nice one for a school project, but that’s it.
No one has ever touched them, though - hacking, complimenting, or otherwise. Just small time stuff I never update anymore, let alone know the URLs.
However, I wouldn’t mind making more now that I know java, CSS, and flash pretty well.
I had a blog on Blogger for nearly two years, then a few months ago I moved to my own domain. It’s still just a blog, but now I can host pictures and movie files and such. I’m apparently supposed to get e-mail addresses with it as well, but I can’t figure out the setup and I’m too lazy to call godaddy.com’s tech support. (If you do start your own site, GoDaddy has the cheapest rates I’ve seen, and their tech support is terrific, in my experience.)
Because I write compulsively. This gives me a forum to write all I want, and if someone decides they don’t want to read my trenchant witticisms anymore, they can get bent.
Depends. Today I didn’t write at all because I worked late, but I’ve often spent two or three hours on an entry that no more than twenty people will read.
Sometimes people leave comments. Not much, really; there’s a small circle of blogs that I read regularly and who read mine. I know most of them in person.
Nope.
You sound like a perfect candidate for Blogger. It’s free; give it a test run to see whether you’ll stick with it.
For right now, I just have my personal site (http://www.tim.cx). It’s just a daily blog/picture gallery thing. Pretty standard personal page stuff, really. I spend about 15 minutes a day on average, posting a new blog entry or uploading a new picture gallery… stuff like that. Now that its entirely PHP/mySQL based, it takes very little time to add new content. The reactions are mostly positive, but its a low traffic site made mostly for myself, friends, and family. Soon I should be adding more content and increasing traffic, though. It’s never been hacked.
I’ve maintained several others, most notably a site called junkmachine. I had some good luck with a project on that site that landed me a couple magazine and newspaper interviews, and even on television once. I got slashdotted a few times and had mucho traffic. I would get 120-150,000 visitors per day. It got hacked on a weekly basis and took far too much time to maintain considering how little income it made me. I sold the site right before it was unrepairably hacked. It was sad to see the site and all content deleted, but kind of a relief at the same time.
I have a little personal website, mostly because I have free space on a server. It’s mostly for family and friends. I have a few pictures up there, and some recipes. I don’t spend a lot of time on it (maybe half an hour every week). I’ve never been hacked, because that would just be a waste of time.
I have 2, both for business. This one is a general contact info and qualifications site about my main business. It’s mainly for clients or potential clients who already know about us to get more info & see that we’re “real”.
The other one is a specialized information service that brings in a little spare cash on the side.
2. How much time do you spend maintaining it (assuming you do it yourself)?
Probably less than I should … once they’re up & running properly, probably not even an hour a month.
Exisiting clients use it as intended … can’t say I get a lot of other feedback.
Nope.