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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."
Remember all those free hosting services? Where are they now?
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.
Further down the food chain, there's 50megs.com, at $2.00/month. Free if you're willing to accept ads. Less space and fewer features.
If you don't want the bother of running a web site, there's Myspace and its clones. Geocities is still around, although now owned by Yahoo.
If you want to store public domain material of lasting value that others might someday need, you can get a free Internet Archive account and upload it there. They have petabytes of disk space. If you have software source, there's SourceForge.
So who needs another free hosting service?
Could this be the begining of the end of the paid hosting business ? I wonder what will happen to all those web hosts who are providing shared hosting plan now. If this trend catches on, only dedicated hosting will be profitable for these professional web hosting providers.
Having said that, I welcome this new venture by WikiPedia founder.
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Very good point.
I'd also add that perhaps they are not trying to "give away hosting" for a bunch of independant little pages, but are trying to create a community. If you look at their demo (which is limited right now), it looks like they will be encouraging all the users to use a sort of "standard" wiki engine for all the content. I think the idea is to encourage people to generate content in a structured way.
Once done, the openserving top-page (or some other domain) can act as a neat aggregate of all of this, a portal to the various pages/projects. Perhaps this top-level page will have ads and this ad revenue is part of the business model. (Granted they make less money than if they take a cut of all ad revenue, but by letting users keep the ad-revenue for the sub-pages, they attract more users.)
I think there are many ways that this can generate money, but most people always think in terms of "making the most money" instead of "making a reasonable amount of profit." (See story about Craigslist currently on slashdot front page, for instance.)
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I think there is a business model. Just because he is publically saying "I don't know yet" doesn't mean he doesn't have one (or probably several) ideas about how to make money. And the investors are probably thinking similarly.