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Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting

Posted by Zonk on Tue Dec 12, 2006 11:49 AM
from the hosting-for-nothing-and-your-wiki-for-free dept.
The Internet Businesses
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."
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[+] Wikipedia Founder Working on User-Powered Search 74 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikia corporation, has revealed plans to offer a user-driven search engine. Ars Technica reports that the plan is to leverage user preferences to pick the 'best' site for any given search term, while at the same time utilizing advertising for commercial gain. The article admits this may not be the ideal solution: 'Users may be reluctant to contribute to the betterment of a commercial site that may end up being bought by a bigger company. Consider, for example, the tragic death of TV Tome, a comprehensive community-driven television content guide that was eventually bought by CNET and transformed into a garish, excessively commercialized Web 2.0 monstrosity of significantly less value to users.' Just the same, Wales seems very enthusiastic in the Times Online article highlighting this venture."
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  • Not webhosting, wiki hosting (Score:5, Informative)

    by suso (153703) * on Tuesday December 12 2006, @11:51AM (#17209748) Homepage Journal
    Well I guess its not automated account generation, I signed up 30 minutes ago and still haven't received welcome info.

    • Re:Not webhosting, wiki hosting (Score:5, Informative)

      by DragonWriter (970822) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:53PM (#17210814)
      Their front page says "Openserving will go live shortly" which suggest it isn't live yet. When I've seen systems that accepted sign-ups before they were live in the past, its been a pretty mixed bag of systems that would provide a normal automated welcome response but you couldn't access the service till it was live, sites that would provide a "we got your registration and will process it when we are ready to accept users" response, and sites that didn't respond at all until they were live.

  • Obligatory underpants gnomes quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by elrous0 (869638) * on Tuesday December 12 2006, @11:53AM (#17209794)
    '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.

    Isn't this the real-life equivalent of the underpants gnome line?

    1. Give away bandwidth and the storage
    2. ??
    3. Profit!

    Maybe he's been reading too much /.

    -Eric

    • 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.
    • Is Nathan Lane or Mathew Broderick involved?

    • My take on it (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kadin2048 (468275) <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Tuesday December 12 2006, @01:05PM (#17210984) Homepage Journal
      I don't have any idea where they think they're going to make money -- I wouldn't be forking over my dough to this guy and expecting any of it back, but then again I'm not a venture capitalist. I do think I understand a little more of what the site is about, though.

      It's more than just "free web space," a la GeoCities. It's basically a prebuilt dynamic web site. You can take a look at one example here [openserving.com]. It's sort of like a miniature Digg. The site creator and its users write the stories, like a blog, and can then vote on them and comment.

      I think the key is that the content of the sites is under the GFDL, in order to qualify for the free hosting. At least I think this is the case, because the site goes on and on about "free software and content". I think that's where Wales' master plan comes in; it's a way of encouraging people to create more free content. One assumes that if this really takes off, they'll charge for hosting of non-free materials. But in the short term, it might greatly build the amount of content that's available under a free license, and which can be incorporated into other projects, like Wikipedia and the Commons.

      Really it looks a bit like Sourceforge, only for blog-ish sites rather than OSS software projects. They handle some of the site maintenance and backend work, and in return you get a free website...assuming you meet their standards. If you don't, then you can pay for hosting (theoretically, at some point in the future).

  • Easy Answer (Score:4, Funny)

    by Goody (23843) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @11:59AM (#17209920) Journal
    'If we give away the bandwidth and the storage, and we get none of the advertising revenue, what's the business model? '

    They will make it up in volume!

  • Come on it's obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:00PM (#17209926)
    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?

    Free web hosting? Jimmy Wales? dubious investors? That's *got* to be something to do with pr0n...
    • dubious investors?
      Hmmm, Omidyar Network belongs to Pierre of the same name. He was the founder of eBay. So dubious...yep, could be, at some point down the line at least...

      At least I would wonder how long free really means free. Omidyar is no Jeff Skoll. Sure looks like there's an undisclosed agenda here.

  • Business Model? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by space tyrant xenu (996203) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:02PM (#17209966)
    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.

  • This sounds (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JustNiz (692889) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:02PM (#17209968)
    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.

  • Question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wile_e_wonka (934864) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:02PM (#17209972)
    How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages? And how does the 100% ad revenue thing work if you use Adsense?

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DragonWriter (970822) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:49PM (#17210752)
      How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages?


      The details of its features advertised by openserving.com [openserving.com] are different than either of those; its seems to me broadly similar to blogspot, though.

      • The sample pages they show in the tour look like blogger pages.

        This is hardly a revolutionary site. The addition of voting on articles makes it a little more like a digg site.

  • "Free Culture" (Score:4, Funny)

    by NineNine (235196) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:02PM (#17209976) Homepage
    "Open source was the beginning. Free culture is what's happening next," Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said Monday, announcing the company's plans at the Le Web 3 conference in Paris on the future of social media.

    Sorry to burst your bubble Gil, but here goes: Who's gonna unclog my toilet in thie "free culture"?
  • Yeah. I'd think the Wiki founder is 'open' minded so he thinks it's cool (according to what he said). But WTF are the VCs thinking giving money to basically handing them out??

    • Re:WTF are the VCs thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TrueKonrads (580974) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:20PM (#17210248)
      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) .

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by generationxyu (630468)
      Jimbo Wales is the VC. He's absolutely loaded. Wikipedia ran for years out of his own pocket.
      • Yeah 4 million dollars is probably pocket change for VCs, but they are not charity. Their sole purpose is to get a return from an investment. Without a clear vision to profitability, the VCs cannot be accountable to their clients. May be we're missing something here.

  • Loads of Problems (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WebHostingGuy (825421) * on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:06PM (#17210022) Homepage Journal
    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?

    • This will inevitably lead to... wait for it... Wikiverts! My only question is, will the user community get to edit the advertising -- and can you imagine the results.

    • Am I the only person who likes this idea? I've been hunting for a free place to host a very small webpage to house some text files and jpgs, and perhaps host a small blog, but not enough to warrant getting my own domain/pay-per-month, that allows me to eschew nasty ads, and allows me to have some control over the format of the page. This seems nice, to me, even if some idiots try to take advantage of it, I'm sure they can cap bandwidth or something to keep tis from happening.

      Being against a somewhat chari
      • I think that you don't get much control over the format of the page, judging from the tour [openserving.com]. Why wouldn't googlepages or blogspot work for your purposes? They're both free and appear to give a little more leeway in the format. In fact, I think this is a little different from what you want, because it looks like it isn't only the "owner" of a site that gets to write articles on his site (I'm not sure of this though; the tour wasn't totally clear) and I'm not sure if pictures get to be posted.
        • I do have an account on Blogspot, but blogging really doesn't fit my writing style. I would like to have nice, clean pages with links to some static documents, perhaps a small wiki, and some control over what I can have there (perhaps little forum, like YABB, if its still around). Mostly though I just need a place to plant text and doc files.
    • 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?

      So, it's a honeypot? Maybe they plan to make money by suing people. :)

  • Hi there, (Score:5, Funny)

    by captnitro (160231) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:07PM (#17210032)
    Hi there, people reading this article ten years in the future.

    If Openserving was a giant success, then I am all for it. The commoditization of culture and expression is the future, and I should be noted as before my time. Find me in the present, give me gifts. We'll go do expression stuff together or something. You can cry into my neuroblog and listen to emo with me.

    If Openserving was a huge flameout that eventually meant the end of the company for yanno, giving away things that take resources for free, then I am rightly skeptical and predict this as a stupid move that will waste lots of money and time. Find me in the present and we'll go to a brick-and-mortar store where you can purchase me a neuroblog. I don't know what that is yet, but it sounds exciting.

  • Only for free content... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:08PM (#17210056) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Only for free content... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kebes (861706) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @01:38PM (#17211426) Journal
      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 [openserving.com] (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.

  • That's so Web 1.0 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:12PM (#17210124) Homepage

    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. [ezpublishing.com] 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 [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 [archive.org] and upload it there. They have petabytes of disk space. If you have software source, there's SourceForge. [sourceforge.net]

    So who needs another free hosting service?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nasarius (593729)
      Remember all those free hosting services? Where are they now?
      Alive and kicking. [freewebspace.net] I'm using one (AwardSpace) to host my domain for now. I have 200MB of space, 5GB transfer, a small MySQL database, and Perl and PHP support. For nothing, that's pretty damn good. Personally I need more, and will eventually be moving to a cheap VPS.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bcrowell (177657)

      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

  • I do wonder how many people will actually make use of this service. Lots of people still mistrust things that come for free, and even more people (usually rightfully) mistrust things that come completely without a business model.

    Add to that the fact that web hosting is pretty affordable these days. If you had a website that actually mattered (say, for business), would you build it on top of something that appears as dodgy as this - or would you just buy "proper" hosting for a little extra cash? I tend to
  • 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.

  • The Catch... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JD-1027 (726234) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:33PM (#17210470)
    Anyone can modify your website.

  • "Web hosting"? (Score:3, Informative)

    by DragonWriter (970822) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @12:46PM (#17210706)
    If you go to openserving.com, they already have a description and tour, and its not really a traditional web hosting service. Its more like blogspot, though the details of the features are different (like the "democratic" sorting.)

  • There seem to be a lot of posts on how free web hosting will or will not be successful. That's not what I see in this story at all. I see a big huge giant

    >They somehow received a $4 million dollar investment package from Bessemer Venture Partners,

    This could mean the end of Wikipedia! Seriously. Every time an investment company gets involved, all they seem to do is destroy companies. Wikipedia could have limped on forever, creating a better and better site and making everyone happy. Now in a few yea
  • Three slashdot headlines in a row, one about what the internet can be [slashdot.org] (simple and efficient and useful and not greedy), what the internet may become [slashdot.org] (whatever venture capitalists may spare on 'out-there' ideas) and what consultants think it should be [slashdot.org] (who cares)... The only headline missing is about the latest google news.
  • I'm curious about the code base. For the screenshots it seems a lot like MediaWiki, but with other extensions I've not seen before allowing comments on pages and voting on stories and comments. Anyone know what they are using?
  • Some companies just profit by people being on the web. Some big search companies who sell ads, and who really like Jimmy. These, or this, big company wants all info on the web, but they don't want people to get spooked [google-watch.org], so they get Jimmy to host the data, and they spend their time selling ads, and giving Jimmy the kick backs.

    By the way, free web hosting sounds different than "here's your personal wiki page, good luck maintaining it."

    Anyway, that's just one way the could make a buck.

  • Wales is no fool (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vtcodger (957785) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @01:48PM (#17211596)
    Based on his record, Jimmy Wales is no fool and I imagine that he has some plan in mind to eventually make money for his investors. His concept, whatever it may be may, or may not, be nefarious. It might be something as simple as someday tying optional money making ventures to a major, largely free of charge website. Which means creating the web site first.

    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.

  • But I hope they do something about people deleting my site over and over again and replacing it with some crap.

    My site (If it hasn't been deleted!) [wikipedia.org]


    Just kidding/avoiding a troll-mod!

  • Awesomo! (Score:3, Funny)

    by StikyPad (445176) on Tuesday December 12 2006, @07:16PM (#17216678) Homepage
    Wow [geocities.com], free [anglefire.com] web [2hot2cool.com] hosting! [fortunecity.com] How [freewebpage.org] could [myspace.com] it [250free.com] fail [tripod.com]?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gigne (990887)
      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 fea

    • In other words, "what's the business model? Well we scam money from investors, and have a damn good time spending it. When the money runs out, we get new jobs on the high-flier reputation of running a multi-million dollar venture."

      Actually, the business model is that Jimbo Wales spent the early part of his life making disgusting amounts of money in the futures market. It's not so much "what's the business model" as "when is the time going to run out?" I don't think Jimbo is really concerned with makin

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