Ken Imhoff spent 17 years building his own Lamborghini Countach in his basement. When it was finally done, he had to dig a hole to his basement and blow out a wall to get his home made car out. Of course, a story like this attracts a lot of attention and Ken became pretty famous for his dedication to the project.
Fame has brought its share of problems. In Ken’s case, the traffic coming to his site resulted in a $957 web hosting overage bill. Normally, Ken pays $8 per month to host his site. To help offset some of the overage charges, Ken has placed a PayPal donate button on his site and is asking readers to help out.
Please don’t take this the wrong way. I have given everything free to the world on my story and expected nothing in return, that was my intention. My website service on the other hand doesn’t feel that way. I have been charged $957 this month over my normal $8. That would feed my family for a month. I will make this short. If the story pleased you and your readers please go back to www.kiengineering.com and I have placed a PayPal donation to offset the costs. Every little bit will help.
Thanks again
Ken Imhoff
aka Countach Guy
Ken should have contacted me when all that traffic came in. I would have helped him made money on it. Hey Ken! I’ll pay your web hosting bill in exchange for the car! 
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{ 98 comments }
i didn’t know they’d overcharge you like that, i always thought your site would just go down when you went over your bandwidth :/
#1 problem is having your site hosted with GoDaddy.
Not hardly.
It’s better you host with a host like HostGator or some other which provides with unlimited bandwidth nothing else could have asked a penny!
I ve moved to host monster..no more go daddy they suck big time
haha yea man, GoDaddy Sucks!. lol
I mention tha host company name to my father, and he asked “Who would join a company name GO DADDY?!”
Peace and Prosperity 88
the main thing is he didn’t monetize the trafic and look at the host they didn’t suspend his account instead these guys were sitting there making money on his traffic pretty evil
No, how were they making money. It was his content, his website, no one even knew about the website, he just has a small button at the bottom!
I still don’t even see the PayPal button?
i think he didn’t check the site stats regularly otherwise he would put some adds, adsense at least to pay the bills(or should have done something about it early)
I thought the same exact thing, how can they do that?
lol.. i will sponsor lifetime hosting for the car
I would too! Haha..
I’ve never been overcharged like that even when some of my sites exploded.
Really, I mean how much traffic did the guy get?
The main thing is his account , i think that was a basic account
IF you could afford a car like that.. I am sure thousand dollars aint much..
calling all boxing fans check out site.
I’m sure it cost him way more than $1,000 to build his car.
Haha, You are so Right!
Yeah that’s what I thought. I wonder if this was a term in the conditions.
if he is stupid enough to leave 2048×1536 pixels images on his page, that are like 1.3 MB each, he kinda deserves this…
That shouldn’t be a problem, if he has an unmetered hosting plan – although it could cause problems in terms of availability of the site if the server resources can’t keep up.
i guess if he had such an unmetered plan, he wouldnt have been charged that amount.
If you receive 61440 Visitors a heavy website like that one then you end the hosting bandwidth of GoDaddy, but if he’s charged with $900+ I can imagine the number of visitors he would have gotten,on his website to cross GoDaddy’s 300GB bandwidth, as it says in their plan. Assuming each visitors downloads 5MB(That’s the size of only the home page)
it’s not “stupid” at all, he wasnt expecting such a huge surge of traffic and he wasnt trying to make money with his site in the first place
but he knew he doesn’t have money (or he would never ask for the money like this) so he should monetize to pay bills for sure (at least now )
I wouldn’t say he deserves it, it’s an amature mistake.
But having large resolution images squashed is bad for a number of reasons.
1) Squashed images are less sharp
2) Uses a lot of bandwidth
3) Slows page load time
4) Page too slow for dialup users….. they aren’t going to wait 5mins for the page to load.
Photoshop is cheap enough.
Yea, Photoshop is less than the cost of his hosting bill.
Ive had overcharges for bandwidth in the past when i was in college and i ran other sites – but no bill like that – ouch!!
He could have definitely monetized his site with advertisements and affiliate programs. He lost a lot of money from it and probably ended up losing money from his website.
He should have chosen a host with “unlimited traffic” so that this way he wouldn’t have to pay. Of course, once a site’s traffic becomes very high, these unlimited sites will shut them down and ask you to upgrade your plan, which is the time you switch to another server.
WOW yep that is a big problem and I hope I have that problem someday. I on the other hand prepare for things like that as you all should too by making sure you can monetize your site as it’s happening or before it happens.
I would assume just a simple adsense on his site could have cut a lot of that bill in half with the amount of visitors coming in.
Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. He should start hosting his pictures on a different service, like Flickr.
Great idea! Smartest one I’ve heard in a long time.
I agree, pass the hosting of the images to sites that are dedicated to image hosting, but than again sites like photobucket only allow so much outgoing bandwidth per month and I hate for my visitors to see that over the limit image when they visit. Looks very unprofessional.
What’s crazy is that by being mentioned here and a few other places I bet he’ll make enough in donations to buy a new Lambo…
In conclusion, if you want a Lamborgine do not buy one just build one.
Mario
hahahha blowing up a part of the house to take the car out, damnnnnnn
Like John said, it’s a shame that he obviously didn’t seem to have a net-savvy friend in his entourage who could have advised on a monetization strategy for the report on this incredible project…
Mind you, it’s not too late… especially with so much linklove for his site (including from this site!)
That sucks for him. He could’ve been getting that $957 and MORE had he monetized his traffic.
I think that it goes to show that there is still a lot of room in the MMO realm if you know how to market to the newbie audience.
I always caution people hosting with their registrars. It seems like a good deal at the time until you get dugg or massively stumbled and then your server blows up. He should have gone with someone like BlueFur or Bluehost.
I don’t get it. He was building the car during 17 years? wtf?
Sounds like one of the medieval stories where you travel to china and it takes you 8 years.
Do you expect it to be done in a day or something?
Ouch. That’s a pretty big overuse bill. I’d way prefer they shut down my site instead.
Moral: Know everything about your host before you signup with them.
Indeed ouch. I second that what Bloggeries said, that he’ll make enough to buy a new lambo from the donations, and linklove.
Cheers,
The Moneyac
Hell, I’ll pay for his overcharge from his hosting company if he’ll give me the car.
Yeah, that car is hot.
I hope he will reconsider and start monetizing the site now. After featuring him here, he’ll probably get another traffic boost and then the Bill will come
John, you ARE truly evil
Ha! I never thought of it that way. Muhahaha!
LMFAO I never thought of that either. I wonder if John really planned that?!
Awesome car, and story. I wonder how much the car cost to make.
$957 overage, how? Typically shared hosting shuts down the site if it gets too much traffic to prevent overages, I don’t see how they can legitimately charge him that much.
Good question, general consensus here is that large a bill seems unlikely.
Seems like he may have been ripped off.
imagine if he had a how-to and adsense….
Wow, you could’ve helped a lot and I’m sure a generous person like you could just send him over $1,000
-Mike
Yes! And this can be spun into a few posts here and there with great exposure..
Web hosting bills in exchange of car, the car on which he spent 17 years of his life
that is funny.
Haha, there is no wonder he has crossed his bandwidth the home page is about 5 MB because of the images!
Wow thats crazy! Sounds like his host ripped him off. I doubt he was doing 50mbit of bandwidth.
That’s not a real Lambo, it’s a fake. Why didn’t he just build the car outside in his garage?
What the hell are you talking about?
there are many free hosting services online which he can try
He isn’t the only one to build a car inside his house. There was an episode of top gear with a guy building a racing car in his kitchen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ZZ7IXugno
With hosting i think he just needed to seperate the images to a free image hoster, i can’t imagine the site using that much traffic without images.
What What! Just b/c you can frontside kickflip doesn’t mean you can grapeflip. Just b/c you can double frontside flip doesn’t mean you can double grapeflip.
One of my small sites had a tsunami of traffic the day yahoo news linked to it. My host billed me for a small fortune, but I negotiated them down to -0-. Of course, I had to upgrade to a new hosting plan for $14.95 per month. How fair is that? Very fair, I think.
Have a very happy day !!
Sad! He could have definitely monetized his site with advertisements and affiliate programs. He lost a lot of money from it and probably ended up losing money from his website.
Hah, I wonder what else he’s got down there. Car needs a windshield too. It shows that if you do things a little differently than everyone else YOU GET ATTENTION so why everyone builds cookie cutter blogs is beyond me. Great article.
Ugh that reminds me, I hate my blogs template so much I just cut out all the graphics and left it plain like a newspaper… help!, Where’s NATE!?!
Fail on his part for not monetizing that traffic. I am a little surprised that the web host didn’t contact him when he was going way over the initial amount of traffic allowed, it seems really shady for a browser to not at least let him know.
That’s unfortunate that his hosting bill was that expensive. However, I do admire Ken’s dedication the his project, and going so far as to take out a wall in his house to share it with the world. I’m sure you would have been fond of his Lamborghini. Thanks for sharing his story!
I think the car is great! And I do think that was an underhanded thing to do on the part of his hosting company. They should have just shut his site down like they did to my other site. I may have to switch hosting companies…any recommendations?
I like E-Starr – http://www.e-starr.com
Talk about trying to monetize your website after the fact, but really if he can afford the custom made car, does he really need assistance on his web hosting bill?
I mean that wasn’t a rebuilt 1991 Honda Civic we’re talking about here. You can’t build luxury cars and ask for handouts at the same time.
wow $957/month is really big and with $8 that he can only afford is really a big problem also, why can’t he moving his site to a better host and with low price? there are many better hosting with huge space and low price these days
Lol the photo is hilarious.. was it really taken for this topic?
Wow Lamborghini! How much is that?
this is really cool! Ken nice car
Evil as always. Anyway, how come the host didn’t have a bandwidth limit to stop the site when the traffic hit the line?
I never host a website with Godaddy
This is interesting, i hope you all read the posts how John Chow revenue was used to sky rocket due to the Digg effect until he was banned for Digg. But after getting unbanned, he was not able to repeat the success. If not go to the old post, its a very good read. Right John
Pretty large hosting bill, but then again did’nt he save some money the last 17 years? I must admit he build something awesome, but If he decides to build another Lamborghini (which would take him another 17 years to build) tell him to put some money away every month just to be on the safe side;-)
Enough with the jokes, awesome project man and it would be a better idea not to repair the wall but install a garage door. You never now what your thinking about building next
I wonder if the $900 GoDaddy got will make up for the bad publicity?
What an opportunity to monetize his blog with all that traffic, why does he need donations?
Yeah, he needs to get into IM.
Yeh If I was him I would install WP and add some ads, maybe expand his story a bit, he has the traffic why not profit from it
If I had the kind of traffic he must have had to get this hosting bill, I would have earned 10 times the cost of it and easily made $10,000 from nearly any of my sites.
wow.. that’s massive traffic to get overcharged like that..
He is one dedicated man to work at that car for 17 years! It’s a beauty though
I hope he takes you up on your offer John!!!
A bad situation, but we someone will help him to let him tell his story with a cheap way.
Good problem to have … though pain is felt in the interim, should be good for the longer term ..
As good as me for not being lucky even after such hard work.
I think like most people here, He had no Ideal that so many people would visit his site, otherwise he would have 1) had an unlimited plan 2) planned to monetize the site 3) resized the images before posting. Again like most people here I have an unlimited hosting plan and I could only wish for the amount of traffic that he received, the next time I decide to teach my dog a new trick I will post a video in hopes of going viral and crashing my server, but not before I get some money….
Funny!
Was that Godaddy that ripped you off? I have used them for over 1000 domain purchases but I cannot stand their webhosting. Dude write to Bob Parsons.
That is sick… Still he could sell that car for tops bucks it’s gorgeous
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Yea, this type of comment is always great to have on any blog…
Lol, that might have helped their sites out a bit… in 1998. Now it gets every site on that spam list … on a spam list with Google. Very bad for business.