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Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting

Posted by Zonk on from the hosting-for-nothing-and-your-wiki-for-free dept.

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."

1 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. That's so Web 1.0 by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?