Wikipedia Founder to Give Away Web Hosting 108
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."
Not webhosting, wiki hosting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not webhosting, wiki hosting (Score:5, Informative)
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The email you'll receive:
Unless you meant is your account hasn't been created yet.
Obligatory underpants gnomes quote (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this the real-life equivalent of the underpants gnome line?
Maybe he's been reading too much /.
-Eric
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A springboard for other things is nice.
The accounts users can create are not much more than slashdot accounts and Journals.
post publicity slaughter? (Score:1)
Ah... I still remember all my Buffy fan sites hosted on the late XOOM that died, when the company decided to out on the web-serving, suddenly and without notice.
The iProducers? (Score:2)
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My take on it (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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I think Angela Beesley, cofounder of Wikia, said it best: "So far, there are two ways Wikia has made money - advertising and venture capital/angel investment". (1) [wikipedia.org] Now they've decided to get rid of the advertising. The "???" is clearly "get suckers to give you venture capital".
Seriously though, the last time I heard venture capital referred to as "making money" was right before the last dot com bubble burst.
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Easy Answer (Score:4, Funny)
They will make it up in volume!
Potionomics (Score:1)
Come on it's obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Free web hosting? Jimmy Wales? dubious investors? That's *got* to be something to do with pr0n...
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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.
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That makes this statement completely different!
Business Model? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This sounds (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Damn straight it is. With the holidays approaching, do you know how hard it is to buy for those guys?
You wanted the other article. (Score:2, Funny)
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Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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)
Sorry to burst your bubble Gil, but here goes: Who's gonna unclog my toilet in thie "free culture"?
Re:"Free Culture" (Score:5, Funny)
It won't matter, because in the "free culture" we'll all be so goddamn smug that our shit won't stink.
-Eric
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(And by the way, would it kill slashdot to tell me the amount of time I must sit here, twiddling my thumbs, in between hitting reply and hitting "submit" to post a comment?)
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No, but then the clouds of smug will kill us all!!
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You. Free culture means learning how to carry your own weight.
If you actually have honest plumbing problems beyond just cleaning up after yourself, I know a couple of guys who really take pride in being excellent plumbers. They enjoy being good at what they do, and they don't think of the job as something which diminishes their sense of self-worth. But if you think of plumbing as something which makes a person less valuable, then I imagine it might be s
WTF are the VCs thinking? (Score:2)
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Hmm. What about "itsatrap"?
Re:WTF are the VCs thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, for some vc's 4 mil is what their Yacht costs in maintenance ( year) .
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if this guy can make wikipedia
That would be the Wikipedia that relies on donations to operate and makes no money at all?
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Loads of Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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Being against a somewhat chari
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So, it's a honeypot? Maybe they plan to make money by suing people.
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Only westerners still think bandwidth is expensive because it still is to our premesis.
My GF in Korea has 150 Megabit for about $30 a month.
Now let's assume that's about the same as what the supplier is paying for (They oversell a bit, minus costs and margins)
Do you know how many websites with no files larger than 5Megs you could host
Hi there, (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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)
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)
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?
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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
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My experience with cheap web hosting was that you got what you paid for in terms of reliability.
I was going to say something good about my hosting provider, but then one of my sites just went down and has been unreachable for 48 minutes now. Somebody broke the routing within the server farm; the server is up, but my site's IP address on it is returning "Destination Unreachable". Fortunately, it's a site in development that hasn't gone live yet.
And this is an outfit that claims "99.99% uptime".
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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 us
The question is... (Score:2)
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
Beginning of the end of paid shared hosting plans? (Score:2, Interesting)
Having said that, I welcome this new venture by WikiPedia founder.
The Catch... (Score:5, Funny)
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It seems pretty obvious (Score:1)
You say "We must be crazy! This is so awesome for everyone else!" loop them in, get your numbers up to critical mass, and then change the terms of the contract to increase your cut of advertising revenue.
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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
"Web hosting"? (Score:3, Informative)
I see a different problem... (Score:2)
>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
3 /. headlines (Score:2)
Codebase (Score:2)
Rich guy turns generous ? (Score:1)
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Here's One Way the Could Make Money (Score:2)
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)
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.
They've always done this at the old site... (Score:2)
My site (If it hasn't been deleted!) [wikipedia.org]
Just kidding/avoiding a troll-mod!
I would have registered, but... (Score:1)
There's Christianity, Islam, "Jewish" and Hinduism, but no Buddhism?!?
Under music, there are no subcategories for any particular instrument, only 12 genres-- no old-time country or polka?!?
I think the "business model" is also apparent from the registration form: Make it too confusing to collect! There's a field called "google ad code", whose so-called h
Awesomo! (Score:3, Funny)
Summer of Code and now FreeServing (Score:1)
Business deserves better (Score:1)
(A) If you're a business, organization, or individual, there is ownership of your Directory page. No more vandals saying you went bankrupt because you lost a pickle-eating contest.
(B) Semantic tagging. If you know what this means, I needn't say more. If you don't know what it means, check out the ASK query at the bottom of http://www.centiare.com/Portal:List [centiare.com], a
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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