I had a very busy fall at FreeNameAStar.com. It was not quite as good as last year. In total I did almost exactly the same for December. I did well at the beginning of the month, but the Christmas rush was disappointing.  Last year on Christmas eve I made over $300, my best day ever. I did not come close to this amount this year. I am guessing that the economy might have had a little to do with it.

The free stars went like crazy, and this morning I was greeted with a bunch of errors on my status page. I had run out of southern hemisphere stars in the astrological house of Libra. This is indeed strange, and I might not have noticed, but somebody from Australia was trying to order one. I checked and I had less than 2000 stars left in the database.

In 2009 I registered about 27,000 stars. I just added 30,000 stars which should last me until this time next year. I have to keep an eye on it, though. If there is a surge I have to add more stars. I have about 150,000 more stars available, but not added, in the catalog – about 5 years at this rate. I don’t want to add too many stars because there are storage and performance considerations. I only have so much room for data and I don’t want to pay extra for an extra gigabyte.

There are only about 5,000 visible (or near visible) stars left. I make more money on these, but soon I will have to cut them off. The software will run out of certain types of stars, especially Libra for some reason. I would have to rewrite the software to say “sorry, we out of that kind of star” if I were to continue much longer. There are about 100 visible stars left in each house. I will probably cut this off in June after the graduation rush.