Come tax time, I want all the right information in front of me quickly so that I can get it all stuffed in TurboTax and be done.  So how easy was it to handle taxes from various different income and expense streams? 

CJ

Dear old Commission Junction sent me a 1099-MISC so that was easy.  CJ advertisers were the most profitable income stream for me in 2007… so I was glad this was seamless (I’d filled a W-9 for them with my SSN earlier in 2007).

Adsense

Google Adsense also sends 1099’s so that’s easy too.  Good so far.

Expenses

Now to expenses… doing business on the web isn’t free as you know… and I have many miscellaneous expenses through the year.  Basically it’s up to you to keep tabs on it all but I figured that at least for my hosting providers I’d be able to pull a report.  Sadly not so.

Thanks DreamHost

DreamHost pulled through - I was able to pull a summary invoice for 2007 which itemised the monthly payments and the total paid during the year.  Thanks DreamHost.

1&1

1&1.  Sorry guys, you completely flunked this test.  No way to pull invoices for just one year, no way to print out a summary with a total.  Sorry 1&1 but this sucked.

Adwords.

Adwords was a slam dunk.  Just like DreamHost I was able to pull a whole year of invoices with a total paid through the year.  The printout also showed the remaining total owed as well but this isn’t relevant for the tax forms - we only need be concerned about payments.

Now time to add up all those little suckers….!

Ya can’t.

Well, OK, you can force it by using ‘.php5′ as the extension for all the PHP files. This works if you’re writing all your own shit but not much cop if you’re installing scads of downloaded ‘.php’ files.

What bollocks. Dreamhost makes it easy in the web panel - you simply select whether you want PHP5 or PHP4 as default for a particular domain. (Current options being PHP 4.4.7 or PHP 5.2.2)

And while I’m on the subject of figuring out why my DOMDocument wasn’t working, 1&1’s documentation blows compared to Dreamhost’s combination of support Wiki and forums.

Wordpress auto Posting Website script [ php ] US $0.01 (1 Bid) Auction Ends: Wednesday Aug-20-2008 16:25:24 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

You’ve gotta credit it to them.  Dreamhost actually tells you when they screwed up. 

In fact, they tell the whole world on their blog.  So even if you never noticed a server went tits-up, there it is for all to see.  Let’s face it, all hosts have glitches.  Dreamhost is one of the few who open up and admit their mistakes.

Honesty is a rare thing these days.  And I figure if they are so blatant about the glitches, outages and screw-ups then I’m never going to be in the dark wondering if they have kept something from me (or worse, many small outages) which I will never know for sure but will always be there eating up my margins.

AffiliatesOnFire is hosted on Dreamhost.  Thanks Dreamhost.