Running free hosted sites.

Any suggestions?

[Brad]

I am thinking of offering free websites, like a mini Tripod or Geocities, to my visitors. I've found a nice cgi script that will let me do this.

Does anyone have any suggestions, tips, advice warnings on this? I would appreciate any information you could share. Thanks.

[rcjordan]

I've known two sites that did that for "their community" and lived to regret it, finally resorting to pulling the plug on all of their free sites. Adult, hate sites, and just plain loonies moved in pretty fast. Most everyone else, it seemed, didn't know a line break from a meta tag. Hours and hours of "support" was required.

I do it for a very select group. They are hosted by invitation only. But they're providing me with free, timely content, so that makes the hand-holding worthwhile.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I like the way RC puts it, because "that element" is invariably online, some of which spend many hours online ;)

Its a case of trust isnt it? I feel I can trust most people, but all in all, especially on the web, thats just not possible, especially since people know that they can almost get away with murder online.

Its all about control. You could give them free space yes, but you just have to make sure that youre not going to shoot yourself in the foot long term by empowering "joe user"

If you had some sort of moderation, like WMW, perhaps it would be more realistic :) Two main probs I see

1. People uploading offensive stuff
2. People who are gonna suck your bandwidth like a golfball through a hosepipe ;)

These two sorts will find you quick. I think its a good idea though, because the word free is dissapearing fast, especially for credible web space/host

[Brad]

Hmm that idea about invitation only might work. I am very worried about just getting spammed out.

The free stuff is all getting loaded up with popups too. My thought was to use these as a way to build traffic to my site.

[rcjordan]

>invitation only might work.

It works well for me. Besides, you can always broaden your terms of service later. If you start wide-open, it'll be difficult to pull back.

>My thought was to use these as a way to build traffic to my site.

I benefit quite a bit from mine, but the pages that are developed are tightly integrated with the content of the sites. I assign the "account" and build the header and footers containing the pertinent navigation menues. It's more of a content management system than a free pages script. IMO, unless a community has a common theme I don't think the host gets much benefit from the traffic other than to splash a few banners -which isn't very rewarding now.

[mack]

The main problem i would see in offering free sites is the issue of bandwidth theft where a user will sign up and then use your space to store images and then link directly to the images. If i where you i would be very selective about who i allow to use my free service. also keap check on your logfiles to see where the hits are coming from, I belive you can use ciding to prevent peopel from being able to access images from outwith the specific site, this should help. All the best with your idea.

[Brad]

Thanks folks for all the advice. You have helped me focus on how I want to offer these. I will probably offer these by application and invitation to known and active members of my community. I'll try to find folks that will appreciate that I can't compete on disk space size but appreciate the opportuity to get a site with now banners and popups/unders.

I think I will delay on this for awhile and see how things end up going for the big boys. Thanks a lot. :)

[Filipe]

I think this is a very good community building tool, and potentially stands to drive some good traffic to your site (if you treat it as a hub with the sub-sites being the spokes). I recommend having your hosted sites represent your site in some way, either with a banner or a function.

If it's for the site listed in your profile, I recommend providing them with a "mini-search" that lets them search the content in your site. Content is king, so it follows that exposing people to your content as much as possible should get them coming back to your site instead of the hosted sites.