Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting
eldavojohn writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is going to be giving away free web hosting from his company's site Wikia. The company announced this 'free culture' movement at the current Le Web 3 conference in Paris. They somehow received a $4 million dollar investment package from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and individual investors with no business model. Is this a dotcom bubble style mistake or just proof of Jimmy Wales' golden touch?" From the article: "Openserving will go further than Wikia's current services, by giving away hosting services and bandwidth, in addition to allowing site creators to keep the advertising revenue generated by the site. 'If we give away the bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's the business model? Well, I don't know yet,' Penchina said. The software acquired with ArmchairGM will let Openserving customers create collaborative publishing sites, combining elements of blogs and wikis."
Actually, all that content generated by the users will increase page rank for wikia.
A springboard for other things is nice.
The accounts users can create are not much more than slashdot accounts and Journals.
liqbase
Buyer beware is all I can say about investing in a project that doesn't have a clear direction for recouping the initial investment. They have an idea of what they want to do, and it seems like a worthy idea to me, but I'm not sure why companies would want to invest in a project where there's uncertainty like this in getting a return. It seems like this would be a better idea for individuals to support, like a foundation, rather than as a business venture.
like its a gift to net-abusers like spammers, child porners, etc.
I hope they make sure that they get good ID of everyone who hosts stuff on their service and don't have some loophole where people can set up accounts with anonymous/fake ID.
How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages? And how does the 100% ad revenue thing work if you use Adsense?
I admit I am biased since I an in this industry but are they smoking something?
The only places which have offered free hosting have relied on ad revenue to make back the costs. What do they think is going to happen when the warez people hit the site? There goes the bandwidth, the storage and here come the problems. And what about the spammers who will flock to the free site to run the smtp mailers? They are going to spend so much time on fighting off this sort of crap from the legitimate people they won't have time for anything else. And apparently they are going to do this for free?
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
They only host wikis for free if the content of the wiki is also under a free license.
An obvious business plan would be to charge people who want to use the Wikia for hosting non-free content. This has parallels in the free software world, where Troll Tech give away Qt for use by free software, but charge people who want to use Qt for non-free software. Cygnus did the same with Cygwin, and Alladin probably pioneered the business model with GhostScript.
The free wikis will in this scenario work as a combined advertisement and proof-of-concept for the paying customers.
I think VCs think along the lines: "4 mil is peanuts, and if this guy can make wikipedia - something every other schoolkid uses for homework, he probably can stumble upon something that can be monetized. So, we know that it is high risk, but it could be high profit too."
Anyway, for some vc's 4 mil is what their Yacht costs in maintenance ( year) .
Lone Gunmen crew.
Agreed. We saw this happen in the 90's and it seemed to go away for a little while. Now (spit) Myspace has set the standard for truly appalling web design, it's opened the floodgates for any old bozo to make a site with animated graphics and yellow text on a yellow background. Not to mention the potential for _insert drug here_ websites trying to hawk their wares easily.
Two steps forward, one step back.
You know, It is as if millions of web users suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
My experience with cheap web hosting was that you got what you paid for in terms of reliability. A lot of people set themselves up as webhosts, thinking it seems like an easy way to make money. The problem is that they're not organized enough to get good reliability. I had one web host a few years back where the hard disk on my box died three times in 40 days. Not only were they apparently buying batches of defective hardware, but they seemed genuinely surprised when I canceled my account and explained that it was because of the three failures in a row -- apparently they'd never noticed that it had happened three times to the same customer within a short period.
I'm ashamed to say that I'm with ev1servers now (ashamed because they paid protection money to SCO), but they are indeed really, really reliable. Sure, it's $100 a month, but actually if you have a site with decent traffic, it's not that hard to recoup that kind of expense with ads these days.
Another big issue with cheap webhosts is the lack of useful support. It's all outsourced to India, and they don't seem to have any real technical skills.
Find free books.
In point of fact, Wales has done us -- all of us -- a major favor with the Wikipedia. He didn't have to. I'm inclined to cut Wales some slack on this. Let's see what the man is up to before we condemn him.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Besides, web hosting is so cheap today. For under $10/month, you can have a full web site on a good commercial hosting service. You can use CGI, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL, and AJAX. You get a gigabyte of disk space and no limit on traffic.
Actually, they say there's no limit on traffic, but what that invariably means is that there is a limit, but they either can't or won't tell you what it is. Check your terms and conditions - it'll have something in there about abuse of resources, or impact on other users. That's what they use to cancel your account when you use too much.
Remember: they need to pay for the bandwidth they use. They can't just give you as much as you want.