I’m testing the waters with selling my bottle stoppers on Etsy. The site has the benefit of an existing user base, but my small collection of items (currently only one) is most likely lost among the vast quantities of items. I posted a cherry bottle stopper with a stainless steel base as my first test. There has been almost negligible traffic to the item listing with almost every page hit being sourced from the bit.ly link that I’ve posted in a few places. I plan on posting a few more bottle stoppers up there to site for a while. From what I’ve learned so far, popular stores are somewhat self sustaining, but newer, smaller sellers are all but lost in the void. The $0.20 posting fee is trivial and spending a few dollars to force myself to think about how I can market my woodworking crafts is a worthwhile expense.

An alternative to selling on Etsy is to host my own store. OpenCart is currently in the lead of the free apps. Magento was quickly eliminated as being too large/complicated for a site that would only have a few dozen items for sale. I also couldn’t image being able to turn a client loose on its admin interface to manage their business.

Related to the self hosting, I still have a few shared accounts with Joyent. The uptime has been great and my only complaint is that I didn’t upgrade my lifetime shared hosting when they started offering accelerators. That would have given me more options and capabilities with the hosting. In search of a cheap VPS hosting option, I found LowEndBox.com, a blog that posts sub $7/mo hosting deals. If you set your expectations appropriately and do a little bit of research about the companies providing the offer, then you can find a good deal. I managed to get a dedicated 2gb OpenVZ from ChicagoVPS for $7/mo. For the price, it is exceeding my expectations and I plan on hosting a few personal sites and services that can tolerate some downtime. There hasn’t been any provider caused downtime yet, but my expectations are not set to a level I would need for a production site. My expectations may change with time.