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."

Not webhosting, wiki hosting

[suso]

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

[DragonWriter]

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.

Re:

[Nik13]

Odd, I received an email from them faster than I could switch to my webmail tab and hit refresh.

The email you'll receive:

Thank you for your request. Our team will create your openserving account soon.

In the meantime, if you have questions, please reply to this address. We'll do our best to help.

Regards,

The Customer Support Team

Unless you meant is your account hasn't been created yet.

Obligatory underpants gnomes quote

[elrous0]

'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

Re:

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

post publicity slaughter?

[yosofun]

but what happens after they've reached the pageRank publicity? will they just go "hey, we've met our objective, we'd just dump everyone since we couldn't really afford to serve everyone from the start?"

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?

[theshowmecanuck]

Is Nathan Lane or Mathew Broderick involved?

Re:

[theshowmecanuck]

fair enough. :-D

My take on it

[Kadin2048]

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).

Re:

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Re:

[yosofun]

true. when you have a bunch of people with too much money and no idea how to spend it, they'd obviously give it away to anyone who'd shout "i have a great ends to reach" ... (whisper) "but my means is totally secret and not even i know it! muaahhahha!"

Easy Answer

[Goody]

'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!

Potionomics

[Amalas]

Well, of course. Here's a great Order of the Stick comic [giantitp.com] that illustrates the point quite well. =)

Come on it's obvious

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Re:

[owlnation]

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.

Re:

[Fozzyuw]

Free web hosting? Jimmy Wales? dubious investors? That's *got* to be something to do with pr0n...

That makes this statement completely different!

Jimmy Wales' golden touch?

Business Model?

[space tyrant xenu]

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.

Re:

[StarvingSE]

It's because there are people like this [blogger.com] in the world!

Re:

[orielbean]

I agree. I think maybe a viable option would be to recoup a percentage of ad sales on the sites, vs the whole thing. That might work once they get enough user up and running. It might be an initial free push where the page creator gets 100%, then once enough are up to recoup the VC, the site might step in and take a small cut, Amway-style. I think taking a good long look at thier EULA or terms of service might deliver a useful answer.

Re:

[x1n933k]

C'mon! If we look at the demo is clearly resembles Flickr and thus, may fool a few people thinking they're investing in Yahoos next project.

This sounds

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:

[dr_dank]

like its a gift to net-abusers like spammers, child porners, etc.

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.

[Kadin2048]

Senator McCain, is that you?

Re:

[owlnation]

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.

Don't worry, they can use the wiki model here to address this. Get a gang of self-appointed zealots to bully folks they don't like the look of off their servers. I mean it works really really well for wikipedia.

Re:

[FishWithAHammer]

It [wikitruth.info] does? [wikitruth.info]

Re:

[linders]

What the hell is a "porners"? And who in the hell modded this insightful? Anti-Porners? Really, there are plenty options for those people, like countries that doesn't care so much about child porners. or countries that doesn't know how to log IP's

Question

[wile_e_wonka]

How is this different than, like, Blogspot or googlepages? And how does the 100% ad revenue thing work if you use Adsense?

Re:Question

[DragonWriter]

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.

Re:

[slashkitty]

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"

[NineNine]

"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"?

Re:"Free Culture"

[elrous0]

Who's gonna unclog my toilet in thie "free culture"?

It won't matter, because in the "free culture" we'll all be so goddamn smug that our shit won't stink.

-Eric

Re:

[aftk2]

Best comment ever.

(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?)

Re:

[empaler]

(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?)

It used to be 2 minutes (and it was apparent every time), but now it's based on whether or not you're logged in, and probably your karma.

Re:

[emil10001]

No, but then the clouds of smug will kill us all!!

Re:

[Potor]

um, you will.

Re:

[Fantastic Lad]

Who's gonna unclog my toilet in thie "free culture"?

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?

[grumpyman]

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:

[David Nabbit]

"Man, this $4 million is really burning a hole in my pocket."

Re:

[grumpyman]

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.

Re:

[cptgrudge]

Without a clear vision to profitability, the VCs cannot be accountable to their clients. May be we're missing something here.

Hmm. What about "itsatrap"?

Re:WTF are the VCs thinking?

[TrueKonrads]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

if this guy can make wikipedia

That would be the Wikipedia that relies on donations to operate and makes no money at all?

Re:

[generationxyu]

Jimbo Wales is the VC. He's absolutely loaded. Wikipedia ran for years out of his own pocket.

Loads of Problems

[WebHostingGuy]

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?

Re:

[Billosaur]

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.

Re:

[Omestes]

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

Re:

[wile_e_wonka]

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.

Re:

[Omestes]

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.

Re:

[1arkhaine]

Hi, Try http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ [nearlyfreespeech.net]. They are extremely cheap. From their site: Data Transfers (Bandwidth): $1.00 per gigabyte Disk Space (Storage): $0.01 per megabyte-month And if you don't use it, they don't charge. I have a small blog (http://dkell.nfshost.com/drupal/ [nfshost.com]) that costs me something like 3 cents / month to keep up. It's great for me, because I don't expect to receive a huge amount of traffic, so I don't need to pay for any super great plan. Of course, you don't have to have a b

Re:

[Scrameustache]

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. :)

Re:

[Deliveranc3]

There aren't warez people anymore, they invented bittorrent. Basically if they make every file > 5MB a bittorrent link then there shouldn't be any hosting problems.

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,

[captnitro]

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...

[Per Abrahamsen]

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...

[kebes]

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

[Animats]

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:

[Nasarius]

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:

[Hijacked Public]

You forgot about these penniless asshats? [microsoft.com]

Re:

[bcrowell]

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

Re:

[Animats]

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".

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine the people who started Geocities or blogger are still trying to figure out how to spend all the money they made when their company was acquired.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[urbanradar]

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

Beginning of the end of paid shared hosting plans?

[ravee]

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...

[JD-1027]

Anyone can modify your website.

Re:

[dingDaShan]

Somewhat of a WikiFacebook where instead of you writing you personal profile, other people get to?

It seems pretty obvious

[svnt]

You don't attract any attention from clients by giving them the same thing as Geocities or Angelfire.

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.

Re:

[gigne]

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

"Web hosting"?

[DragonWriter]

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.)

I see a different problem...

[bill_kress]

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

3 /. headlines

[dargaud]

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.

Codebase

[pfafrich]

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?

Rich guy turns generous ?

[coachz]

Once every 50 years some rich guy remembers when he had nothing and wants to give back. Maybe this is the case. Maybe he'll even just start sending us money ! We don't need no stinking business plan !

Re:

[imaginaryelf]

Why don't they just send me money directly?

Re:

[coachz]

cuz they are prolly gonna get us hooked on the candy and then sell it to us for a high price.

Here's One Way the Could Make Money

[Slipgrid]

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

[vtcodger]

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.

They've always done this at the old site...

[NemosomeN]

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!

I would have registered, but...

[Beorytis]

...registrants are forced into a list of categories and subcategories that were obviously created by someone who needs to get out a little more. Examples:

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!

[StikyPad]

Wow [geocities.com], free [anglefire.com] web [2hot2cool.com] hosting! [fortunecity.com] How [freewebpage.org] could [myspace.com] it [250free.com] fail [tripod.com]?

Summer of Code and now FreeServing

[VGfort]

Wow, all we need is 3 days of Python and (iPod) Music (in Silicon Valley).

Business deserves better

[thekohser]

There's another wiki that's just getting started, called http://www.centiare.com/ [centiare.com]. It's much like Wikipedia, but with two HUGE differences:

(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

Re:

[generationxyu]

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