[Mediawiki-l] free wiki hosting?

[Michael]

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 at mlug.missouri.edu>
http://kavlon.org