Replying all in one.. forgivie me.
What you offer is good. The only other free wiki hosting I know of with substantial resources is ibiblio. However, folks love their images... Keep in mind that if the wiki is successful as Wikipedia is that it will use substantial bandwidth and storage space and rapidly outgrow even the largest single server.
I might consider allowing uploads, ssh access, and a pop mail account for people willing to spend $60/year for the hosting. Is that unreasonable? Otherwise they could have a wiki with no uploads or ssh access and only an email forwarding account for free. Those limitations would help keep the free accounts from using up all the resources. Also I'd probably put some kind of soft bandwidth and server resource limit that if exceeded I'd have to ask the users to pay for their usage. I can't see the majority of wikis surpassing those limits though. I mainly want to keep people from serving warez or other questionable resource hogging activities off my servers.
Free hosting would definitely help a lot of people I think, especially small online communities...and having no ads and so on would make it golden :) - it's likely that you would be overwhelmed with the number of users who sign up. And I think images are kind of important too ... can't ask people to remote link all the time.
I also think I'd put some kind of limit on the number of users allowed per each of my servers. Each machine has a limit of 500GB of bandwidth per month so if the wiki users started to exceed about half of that then I'd have to stop allowing new users or migrate some users to different servers. Also any users that asked for a site and then didn't use it I'd probably remove the site.
I think that's a fantastic offer and extremely cool of you. I think, yes, there will likely be some demand -- as regards myself I don't know yet though, because I'm still kinda hoping I'll eventually figure out MediaWiki customization and get to install it on my domain/hosting account.
Obviously if someone wanted their own domain, which I'd encourage, they'd either have to buy it and point it at the right server themselves or pay me enough to cover the cost of doing so for them. I would allow a customized wiki if you wanted to pay $5/month for ssh access and you'd handle the installation yourself.
If I were you however, I'd be careful about overpromising -- I prolly wouldn't say: "Guys, I offer free wiki hosting till kingdom come." but rather: "I am currently in a position to offer free wiki hosting and you're very welcome to join, however pls be aware that there are no guarantees as regards the future." That's because you never know how things will develop. And if you promise an "always free" service and subsequently have to retract that, people will accuse you of baiting and switching -- the same thing that happened to Apple with their iTools service.
Definately. All deals are on the whim of the hosting provider, me, and could be canceled if I felt it was being abused or got hit by a bus or just whatever. The "what's in it for me" angle to giving away free hosting is that I'd hope that some of those using the service or the wikis using the service would buy server space from me for any commercial projects they might have. In other words I'm willing to chip in free hosting as long as I stay in business but if I go broke I won't be able to pay for my nice servers and then there'll be no where for the free sites to be hosted. Luckily it doesn't cost very much for each of my dedicated servers so it'd not take much return business to cover my costs. As long as my costs were getting covered I could keep adding new servers as needed to keep offering hosting space.
It would also be interesting to know if what you have to offer could help/be offered to Wikimedia projects. Forgive me my Wikimed-snobbery but I actually kinda think it would do much more good to support Wikimedia project x than hosting Joe, Jane and Ed's vanity wikis.
I'm not sure if I'd want to be involved with large projects as there might be more red tape involved. I don't want anyone second guessing my decisions on my own servers because of project politics. I've offered to sponsor Wikipedia before and the response I got back indicated that they weren't very interested in money or server space unless they completely got their way in everything. Sort of soured me to trying to reach any kind of an agreement with them despite my great appreciation for the project.
As such I might consider asking anyone with a free wiki account to put a link somewhere on their site back to me. No ad banner or anything - just a small text link like 'Sponsored by..'. I'd consider making it optional but I'd be doubtful about how much the service was appreciated if that was asking to much in return.
So, with that out of the way, anyone that is interested feel free to email me and ask for an account. I'll see about setting up a website advertising this free service and I'd be glad to provide links to anybodies wiki even if it isn't hosted on my servers. Just put 'wiki' in the subject so it won't get sorted as junk.
-- Michael mogmios@mlug.missouri.edu http://kavlon.org