TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

So What the Hell Happened? Part 3 of 5: Homestay

Wow. Where to start on this?

In my last post in this series, I shared my brief adventures in dog sitting which didn’t pan out due to our golden retriever Zipper starting to become aggressive to the other dogs.

This left me scratching my head wondering how I’d bring in money again. I was still nowhere near ready to get back blogging or making money online, and my medical condition did not improve at all (it has only worsened over time, unfortunately), which ruled out getting a real job.

Then my girlfriend had an idea which I thought was brilliant and I couldn’t believe that I didn’t think of it myself.

We live in a large newer house at over 2,600 square feet, and it was just the two of us and Zipper living here. Her idea was that we could take in homestay students.

I thought about it for a second, then my eyebrows rose and I kept getting more excited by the minute. She was only half serious too, but I knew it was a perfect idea and was determined to follow it through.

What Is a Homestay?

So what is a homestay? A homestay is a house that takes in paid guests which are almost exclusively young international students in their early-mid twenties. You give them a room in your house and they pay a monthly fee in exchange for living in your house. In addition, you cook for them and they eat with you. They essentially become a part of the family while they’re living with you.

Our Chinese and Qatari students.

While some homestay students can be short term most stay long term – our shortest student stayed for 3 weeks and our longest stayed for 1 year, although we currently have another student who plans to stay with us for 1.5 years. I know of another homestay host near me who had a student for 7 years – she basically became another daughter to her.

What Are the Responsibilities of a Homestay Host?

The main responsibility I have is feeding them and making sure they’re fed. There is also what is called a “Peerstay”, which is roughly the same as a “Homestay”, but the students buy and cook their own food. There is usually a bit less of a closeness between the parents or hosts, and the students as well (often peerstay rooms are suites and have a separate entrance).

In addition to feeding them, I drive them to and from school for an added fee in some cases. The bus service where we live is terrible and we don’t live within walking distance to the schools, so I do offer what is essentially a private taxi service if they want it. This is not typical for a homestay host though, but I do it since I do have to compensate for our location.

I also help them a lot when they first arrive, as most students are arriving here directly from their home country, which is usually in Asia. I help them learn about our culture, show them the city, get them set up with banks, a phone plan, etc.

Basically, I’m a professional dad. However, since the students are usually in their early-mid twenties, they are responsible and mature enough to look after themselves for the most part.

All in all, it’s a fair bit of work to be honest, but it does have its pros and cons which I’ll be blogging about in an upcoming post.

My International Background

Being a homestay host is a natural fit for me as I have actually always enjoyed learning about other cultures.

In 2003 I actually “moved” to Korea at the age of 19 after having immersed myself in their language and culture here (which originally stemmed from my love of Starcraft). I didn’t last long, as I had no plan, but I returned ever-interested in other cultures.

I spent a long time learning Korean when I was 18-19. Unfortunately, I’ve already forgotten most of what I had learned. With language, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it!

When I returned home, I actually got my TEFL certification (teaching English as a second language), but I never did anything with it apart from some private tutoring.

I am also half Filipino (that’s the Cruz in Tyler Cruz!), so all of this has always made me very open to and interested in other cultures.

My Experience as a Homestay Host Thus Far

To date, we’ve had (let me count here…) 6 students, although we have 2 more arriving in a couple of days (at the time of writing his post), then another 3 weeks after that. So we will actually have 4 students living here simultaneously by the end of August! We had 3 living with us at the same time before, but 4 will most definitely be a first and fill us to maximum capacity. I plan on blogging about that in an upcoming post.

Our first student arrived in January 2016, so we’ve been hosting for 1.5 years now.

We’ve had students from China, Japan, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Our students had all been boys, but we got our first girl a couple of months ago, and will be getting 2 more girls and 1 more boy.

What are the Students Like?

Of course, people are individuals and so every student is different. I have definitely noticed trends between different cultures though.

Japanese students are definitely the “best”, if I may be so blunt and attach a stereotype. They are extremely polite, courteous, and super, super clean.

Our Japanese student exploring one of the beachside caves with Zipper.

Chinese are typically very rich. Their culture is so different from Western culture so it takes a lot of getting used to… they can be rather blunt and often feel very entitled, but it’s just a culture difference you need to learn and adapt to. The Chinese students around here, their parents will give them $70,000 at a whim to buy a brand new expensive car. Many even get freaking houses bought for them.

As rich and spoiled (if I may say so) as the Chinese students are here, they have nothing on the ones from the middle east. One student we had, I wouldn’t be surprised if his family is worth a billion dollars.

In general, it makes sense the most international students here have money though, as it is very expensive to send your kid overseas to an international school, and so those that can afford to do so are usually affluent families.

My 3 Asian “kids” (1 Japanese, 2 Chinese) – it’s almost like living in a sitcom!

I can say positive and negative things about all of our students, but in general they have all been very easy to host. The worst part is cooking and cleaning for extra people, that’s all.

How Much Do I Get Paid?

Keep in mind that the amount I charge is reflective on the city I live in, the distance to the university, the size and quality of our house, and the food I offer, so if you were thinking of running a homestay, the rates could change significantly. My rates are in line with other local homestays here.

We have 3 rooms available for homestay students: two upstairs and then one absolutely enormous one downstairs (600 square feet!) which is basically like a small apartment but with no kitchen.

I’ve raised the rates twice so far, since food costs are exorbitant here (4 peaches can be like $10). Our upper rooms are now $800 (CAD) and our downstairs is $900 (CAD). If I drive them to school, I charge an extra fee on a per-day basis.

Lately, I’ve also been offering a discount if the student cooks dinner and cleans up afterwards twice a week. This was an ingenious idea by me which really helps out. Asian students are excellent cooks and can cook at near-restaurant quality. As mentioned earlier, we will have 4 students by the end of next month, and I arranged it so that Lisa and I will only have to cook dinner twice a week. It’s kind of like having live-in chefs!

Our 16-year-old Chinese student showing one of our students some cooking tips. Despite being only 16, he was an amazing chef.

It’s really nice to be able to leave my office, walk upstairs and eat a delicious dinner, and then not even have to worry about cleaning it up afterwards.

I’ve eaten so much Asian food over the past year and a half it’s not even funny.

Next month I have a couple who will be sharing the downstairs space as it is so large, so altogether it will bring in $3,150 a month ($2,830 after the discount for them cooking and cleaning). However, I am budgeting about $12 a day each for them, for the cost of food, so that quickly brings down the profit to $1,390. I will make a bit extra doing the carpooling – after gas costs, it will be $1,690. There are other costs to consider too though, such as toilet paper, Kleenex, added electricity, water and garbage costs, etc. Say another $200. So for 4 students, that would be roughly $1,500 a month profit (which works out to an average of only $375 per student).

So, it’s a tiny amount when you’re giving up such a large portion of your home up, but you also gain a lot of benefits from it as well. You’re never lonely, you get delicious foreign food made for you and the kitchen cleaned up afterwards., etc.

The other thing to consider is that housing prices are rising very fast here, and demand for homestays here lately has been very high so I will raise my rates again in another 6-12 months. There is also economy of scale to factor in here, so my food costs may not actually be as high as I budgeted for it (which is $48 a day for 4 extra months).

More to Come

Stay tuned for my “Pros and Cons of Running a Homestay” post which is already written and in the queue.

I Switched My Hosting Over to BeyondHosting

I used to be a huge HostGator fanboy and had used them for 7 years starting in 2009. Despite being a huge company, they offered fantastic packages at extremely competitive prices. I had their top dedicated server (as well as one of the small virtual servers) the entire time, and was very happy with it.

But the reason I fell in love with HostGator was due to their customer support, they had their priorities starlight thanks to the understanding they had of an align company. It was simply the best customer support I had ever dealt with at the time (tied with GoDaddy) – I would have an issue and could pop onto an online customer support chat and have my issue fixed within minutes, and the customer support was very friendly too. They were good for years, until one they weren’t.

The problem happened after HostGator was sold to EIG for a quarter billion dollars back in 2012. They made major changes, because I could see it in the customer service immediately. Wait times would increase significantly, tickets would go unanswered, and the quality was poor too. I shrugged it off until I could eventually ignore it no longer – one day, and I forget what happened exactly, but they made some software upgrades to my server (without my permission) which caused a lot of my websites to break down since the MySQL database couldn’t talk to some of the websites properly. They refused to fix the problem.

After a lot of searching and research, I ended up moving to BeyondHosting. in February 2016.

BeyondHosting

Now if they sound familiar, it’s because when BeyondHosting was younger, it was very affiliate friendly. In fact, it was the only server company that actually catered directly to affiliate marketers. They offered direct support for affiliate tracking software such as Prosper202 and CPVLab, even going so far as providing free optimization services for that software. Word quickly spread around the affiliate marketing community on how good they were for affiliates. You can also give your business a very impressive new address by using a virtual office in a great city like London so do that if you would like a very impressive postal address and also added privacy.

While I believe they still offer such services (you’ll need to contact them to ask), they’ve since grown quite a bit and don’t market themselves in this manner anymore. I’ve also left my IT services to take care of it. Read More here.

Server Packages

BeyondHosting offers managed servers, which you can customize to your particular needs. You can also customize the level or amount of management required, which is nice to be able to choose.

Prices will range from $32 for a 1 core, 1GB ram, 20GB SSD, basic serviced package, up to $1,632 for a 24-core, 96GB Ram, 1TB SSD, complete managed server. Those are the outliers though: a 2 core, 4GB ram, 60 SSD server with essential support is $138 a month.

They of course also offer enterprise solutions, domain names, SSL certificates, hosted backups, etc.

Customer Support

For me, customer support is the most important thing when it comes to a web hosting company, as my system administration skills are very basic and limited, check out the best software investments.

When I started with BeyondHosting, they were fantastic. When I transferred from HostGator over to them, they transferred all of my websites over which was not an easy task as I had like 40 at the time, many of which required special server set-up’s. They kept at it with no complaining until I was fully satisfied and they were all up and running smoothly

However, I’ve noticed their customer support slowly diminishing over time. In fact, I became quite angry about 4-5 months ago when Votesy had gone down due to a hacker who had wiped the database clean. I had backups in place, but they refused to help me apart from some basic assistance since they didn’t support MongoDB. I can understand this – as they did actually warn me about this when I had MongoDB set up on the server, but at the same time, the MEAN stack is far from an obscure one, and a hosting company should be able to support such a common database platform. At least to restore a backup and make it secure. It was also their fault for not having made it secure in the first place.

That being said, they have always been prompt in answering my support tickets, and never let any go unanswered (like so many other companies often do!). If you have a complicated problem, you should straight up ask for a level 2 or 3 tech equipment to avoid wasting time having a level 1 tech try to fix it. In addition, their chat support is often not too useful unless you have a basic problem, as they are run by level 1 techs who will simply and usually just have you open up a support ticket anyway.

That incident mentioned above has been my biggest gripe with them so far. Otherwise, I have been pretty happy with their customer support.

Conclusion

I have never experienced any downtime since switching to BeyondHosting. I also recommend clicking this link https://www.emergentsoftware.net/services/database/ if you’re looking to hire SQL server experts to help you keep your systems online.

They also accept PayPal, which is a little nice perk since many hosting companies don’t, and it’s a nice way to empty your PayPal account without having to withdraw it to your bank account.

All in all, I have been pretty happy with them.

My New Microphone Setup

When I first recorded my “I’m Back, Baby” post, I couldn’t believe how bad the audio was. It was so bad that I couldn’t stand listening to more than a couple of seconds of it, and it was also difficult to make out what I was saying.

This is because the audio was being recorded from my webcam, and I’ve since learned that webcams are notorious for having very poor microphones (which makes sense; they are very small and also far away). I did some research and ended up buying a Blue Yeti USB microphone, since it seemed to be the common “go to” microphone for a decent USB microphone without breaking the bank.

I recorded a video which reviews it, as well as compares its quality to my webcam and headset microphones:

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see the video.)

Here are Amazon links to the black version and the classic silver version, as well as some photos of my new setup:

The Blue Yeti with its stand. I was too lazy to set mine up so I just stole this image instead.

My new recording setup.

The Blue Yeti on my mount with the pop filter removed.

Stay tuned for my upcoming posts on my pop filter and studio arm microphone stand.

My Review of the Private Affiliate Marketing Forum AffPlaybook

I have been meaning to review AffPlaybook for a very longtime, but never got around to it until now – so I’m hoping this is a better late than never scenario.

There are currently two main players in the paid affiliate marketing forum space (there used to be 3-4): AffPlaybook and StackThatMoney. I will outline the main differences between them further on in this review and also about idxbroker alternative Showcase IDX.

AffPlaybook has been around since around 2010 and was originally called PPVPlaybook since its discussion at the time mainly revolved around PPV-based traffic sources. However, this was obviously a very limiting idea and so David Ford, the owner, rebranded it to AffPlaybook a couple of years later. It now covers all areas of affiliate marketing thanks to the guidance provided by companies like Black Swan Media Co – Providence SEO Marketing, including some discussion on other methods of making money online as well.

I have praised the benefits of paid (private) affiliate marketing forums in the past, and still stand behind those words. Here are few websites using wordpress which all are fantastic resource to learn and network, no matter your skill level. There are guys there who are brand new to making money online and have never even made a website, up to very experienced online marketers who have millions to their name. You’d be surprised just how big some of the guys there are.

Watch My Review

I recorded a 12-minute screencast (I tried to make it as concise as possible) which you can watch below (you will probably want to watch in 1080 HD full screen to be able to view it properly):

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see the video.)

Special Discount For My Readers

AffPlaybook normally costs $67/month, but I was able to snatch a special discount if you sign up through my evil affiliate link (any link in this post) which will give you $10 off the monthly price, bringing it down to $57 a month. This discount will remain for as long as you are a member (not just the first month or two).

It does not apply to the 6-month or 12-month plans, but those are good options as well if you plan on staying for the long term.

How Does AffPlaybook Differ from STM (StackThatMoney)?

Honestly, both forums are extremely similar and if one ever went away and you had to move to the other one, you wouldn’t too notice much of a difference. There’s a reason that both sites are the leaders.

In general though, AffPlaybook is (with my discount link) 40% cheaper, can be paid with via PayPal, has more tools, contests, and follow-along campaigns.

StackThatMoney on the other hand, has arguably more experienced and ‘bigger’ affiliates, as well as more discussion on non-affiliate marketing topics.

It may be worth checking both out to see which suits you best. If you’re on a budget though, then AffPlaybook makes more sense since it is 40% cheaper.

If you’re struggling with making money online and haven’t tried a private affiliate marketing forum before, I highly recommend trying it for at least a month. You simply cannot compare the content you find in there to a public forum such as WarriorForum or Digital Point Forums.