Well, we should have seen it coming, right? This is not just about ad supported free web hosting packages on subdomains as is being offered for years by so many companies. This is about hosting a complete site on a full domain name running not just some blogging software, but a whole CMS (Wikimedia and now soon Drupal) and with advertising revenues being your own rather than of your host. Well, let the news speak for themselves: Wikipedia founder remakes Web publishing economics iNetHoster is offering free domains and hosting Mass Drupal Hosting And I sense this is just the beginning of it. Soon, everyone will be able to start complete web projects completely free of charge (except, maybe, for a full domain name) using some of the most popular content management systems. Wordpress.com already offers Wordpress. Wikia.com will now offer Wikimedia and apparently Drupal, probably later others too. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone started offering full scale, no-trial, use-any-cms-you-want hosting as well. So where does that leave us who pay for our hosting in a world where the same or almost the same can be gotten for free? Also, if so many people can suddenly start web sites of their own, the whole web publishing business is becoming extremely competitive and saturated, possibly driving down advertising prices as well. Or maybe I am wrong, maybe it hides new opportunities. It ought to, actually.. What do you think?
I offer full scale free hosting, and have been for a year, what's wrong with that exactly ? If you feel threatened by someone giving something away, the maybe you should ask yourself if what your selling is worth the money people are paying for it....
I think professional hosting, that accepts larger use of bandwidth and stuff like that, is still going to be the trusted route for serious websites.
Nothing is wrong with that. I am just observing the emerging trend of freely hosted web projects and wondering how would that affect the current web publishers who still pay for hosting and everything. The main issue is probably the increase of competition since many more people will be able to start websites for free and compete with us who pay. I actually don't sell web hosting or anything like that. I am just a web publisher selling advertising on my sites, currently, that's all. kh7 is probably right though. I would still expect more serious commercial projects to be hosted in a "traditional" way. Btw, someone on our forums mentioned that this could be the start of Bubble 2.0, what do you think?
The net is like the universe...there's no end virtually...so are the sites on the www. Thousands of sites shut down everyday and thousands spring up to life and the search engines ( aka Google ) maintaining a record of their birth, growth and death. I see no problem in what you have put in front of us.
Oh well, you're probably right. I'm not really worried or anything, just curious. It would be interesting to experiment with these new free services before paying to start a full project. For example, opening a site about a certain topic on Wikia.com just to see how much interest is there for it and how would we be at it, and then if it goes well, turning it into our own serious site under our own domain name, hosting and all that.. Cheers Danijel