syanet i'm not sure if you're interested but i have an idea

[Omari]

syanet maybe instead of switching to paid hosting only you could just not allow zips, mp3s, exes, rars, and other downloaded files to be put on, make like templates of your adbar, have like white, black, grey, and silver and don't put any borders on them so that people won't have any excuses to not use it. then do it hypermart style. store the ads like in a place where it can not be edited like hypermart does and then on people's html, shtml, and htm pages or all pages besides scripts look for like <!--insert-black-ad--> or <!--insert-white-ad--> or whatever color they want from the colors you provide. if that is not found do like hypermart and have a popup from exitfuel or some other place pop up and you will make more money from people who try to cheat you then you do from the honest people... this might be hard to do but it is worth it... by the way, you might not want to make people lie to their visitors to make them click on your links, maybe you should just put what it really is... then for 4 dollars a month you should have an ad-free option... you can make more money this way and no one will be able to cheat you... just have your staff or even you could just check out the sites and if anyone is trying to get around the ad then their site gets deleted... sounds simple but i'm sure it won't be simple to do that thing hypermart does with 4 different ads but if you can i am sure it would work, hell if i had the cash i would do this my self...

[Omari]

another good idea would be starting people with like 20 megs and allowing them to upgrade to 40 if they get to 15 and you check to make sure they are not just using you for storage... then just keep letting people who are not using you for storage upgrade when they are 5 megs below their limit and once they get to 100 megs, which hardly anyone will do since you won't allow storage, just don't let them upgrade any more.

oh and if you did do this it would be cool to continue to let people fit it in with their site if they e-mail you :) (worth a try even though you probly won't do this just because i think it is a good idea)

[syanet]

Those are some good idea's. I really do want to be a host again in one way or another, so I have to come up with something creative. I'm already working on not allowing certain file types and putting limits per file as well. The hardest part would be the ads such as if the ad isn't displayed, then pop-up a banner. I'll probaly re-open somewhere with an inexpensive pay service, then once I get the advertising situation worked out, start with free hosting again.

[LeX]

File size limits works (but annoying), but the file extension thing doesn't. They could just rename the mp3 or avi files they wanna upload to something like .doc or even .html and ask visitors to right click and rename, and you'll still have the black market behind what seems like a great idea.

About free hosting... IMO, if your services don't differ much from other fwps, then I don't think it will be successful. Think about it....

[Coolin]

However, limiting these file types would still discourage many people from storing files with them. Also, one can do a search and if they find a 1 meg .html file, they can delete it.

[Nick]

Originally posted by Coolin
However, limiting these file types would still discourage many people from storing files with them. Also, one can do a search and if they find a 1 meg .html file, they can delete it.

Maybe 3MBs cause believe it or not, some long texts are huge. I had a all-in-one tutorial on fantasy wrestling once, it was 1.4MBs in one HTML file. Visitors usually just saved it. I've also see tutorials for Perl that are 80+ pages long take up lotta space.

[Coolin]

I'm not just saying "delete the file cause it looks suspicous." I'm saying, this looks suspicious, let's take a look. Hmm, this isn't a real HTML file. *Click/Drag to Trash*