jcink said:
What are your thoughts on sites that require posting for hosting?
Considering that I'm the one who originally came up with
the first original concept of posting for hosting many years ago,
I should probably chime in here ...
I was thinking of making one, but the thing is I don't see the big advantage to it.
The primary reason for hosts requiring posting both in
the past and today is to slow down hosting signups and
act as a form of a population control.
This allows the host time to adapt and adjust to growing
membership in their hosting services. If no population
controls existed, a host would be completely over run
and unable to keep pace with signups would eventually
shutdown and be gone for good as we have already seen
with hundreds if not thousands of hosts over the years.
I've seen alot of people doing it, but there are tons of sites that start it up, then die quickly. They don't seem to last. Sometimes they even try to resurface, but fall once more. There actually ARE a few that are alive though and seem to be doing OK.
If you look a little closer at the stats, you will see that the
most stable hosts are the ones who require forum posting or
have implemented some other population controls such as
stricter applicant signup requirements, etc.
Clubhost City has been around for more than 9 years
and remains extremely stable despite offering large
web plans and high bandwidth without advertising.
The largest factor in that success is that for our first
seven years, we required forum posting and that helped
us get through a long period where other hosts would
rise and fall. Sure, we got people trying to cheat their
way through by spamming the forums but the solution
to that was very simple and we simply required all posts
to be quality posts and only counted those posts that were
worthy to be counted and no more problem!
We eventually developed alternate technology that serves
much of the same pupose as forum posting so the forum
posting control was no longer needed and we could change
to meet current demands without compromising the
stability of the hosting service.
Basically what I am wondering is... what is the big advantage to posting for hosting to the provider? It seems to me like a big hassle for the hoster, to get mods, mod the forum, and then give people no ad hosting.
As I said, it's a population control ...
Most people think it is some sort of scheme to make the
host's forum community larger but the reality is that it
is actually designed to make the hosting service smaller!
If a host has 10,000 new user signups and blindly accepts
everyone, chances are all resources will be exhuasted and
being unable to cope with the mass population rise, the
host will just collapse and fold.
On the other hand, if you take those same 10,000 signups
and you spread them out over a little bit of time, it gives
the host the chance to buy new servers if needed, add on
more support staff, get bigger hard drives, and otherwise
adapt to the growth at a more reasonable pace and that
is precisely the point of forum posting and other
population controls at hosting services.
There was a long period of time where people specifically
wanted hosts that required forum posting because most
everyone knew that hosts that required you to jump
through hoops (posting) to get hosting would be the most
stable hosts and the ones most likely to survive and not
fold out from under them. In the same vain, a lot of
people enjoyed particpating in a real community and
had fun meeting new friends in a forum environment.
These days people have gotten extremely lazy and petty
and don't want to do anything to get hosting, don't want
to pay anything for hosting, don't want any ads, and
certainly don't want to post on any forum community
which in irony as a lot more hosts shutdown and these
same people cry that their host went out of business.
By the way, just as a side trivia note -- when I first
introduced posting for hosting, we required 1,000 posts
just to get 10 MB of web space and everyone was
perfectly happy with that. Today, people whine and
moan if you make them post just 10 posts for 1,000 MB!
Oh how times have changed over the years and not
necessarily for the better!
Adapting to the changing market and changing view points,
Clubhost City dropped most all posting requirements about
two years ago and instead implemented a very strict
application screening system which is really designed to
limit the number of successful signups and effectively
serve the same purpose of forum posting before it. This
gave us a way to meet the changing customer demands of
the present while still serving the controls of the past.
If hosts are going to survive today, they will either need
to adapt to some other type of controls to serve the
previous purpose of forum posting or the present day
public as a whole is going to have to wake up and
realize that maybe forum posting is not such a
bad idea after all!
