The free hosting biz

[Sitebee]

Just a rant.


The free hosting enterprize is getting harder and harder to maintain if your a provider admin. what I mean you get your staff team in order and decide to take a break! what you do comeback to?

So basically saying if you run a free hosting provider your never gonna get a break! You need to keep a check on everything at all times. It may start as a hobby but becomes a job. I miss my Xbox....

 

[visynet]

Well.. I understand how you feel but when you like something... for example I have many hobbies and my real job and I think am becoming a vampire working on night time but when you get your results you feel something that let you say "Woah, what I did is good for someone else"...

I hope that many of hobby-guys like us want continue, because many free host, meant like a real business, many times are really bad! Because they don't put love on it...

Maybe it's just a dream or maybe in some few months later I will post my personal rants but... come one Smile and look at your users, they are happy and thanks to you!!! :beer:

 

[ZoomCities]

I hear you mate

Just make sure your staff are capable of handling everything and familiar with your system, make sure they have access to what they need to keep the flow going and most importantly have access to your contact details incase of emergency.

For the last 2 years or so I have never been very active with ZoomCities but my staff are doing a great job running the show, they just contact me when there's an emergency or something that needs to be done that they dont have access to. As long as I pay my server bills and my staff are doing the right thing, everything is going well.

We cant put all our time managing our free hosting stuff because we have other things to do as well, thats where teamwork kicks in and play an important role... So when you take a break, you wont have to think of your free hosting at all and you will be able to relax and chill out. When you get back your mind is fresh and will be more enthusiastic in running your free hosting

Zac

 

[RU-Adam]

I think the biggest stress factor is dealing with the abuse. Trying to do your best to prevent it and stop it when it does happen.

 

[~ServerPoint~]

If I were free web hosting provider I would come back with paid wen hosting services

 

[fnixws]

Exactly why i just took a 6 week holiday before doing the server reroll.
Otherwise, i never seem to get much a chance to do much of anything else, even with a small client base.

 

[toad]

So basically saying if you run a free hosting provider your never gonna get a break! You need to keep a check on everything at all times. It may start as a hobby but becomes a job. I miss my Xbox....

Have you considered automating the monitoring of your service?

I think the biggest stress factor is dealing with the abuse. Trying to do your best to prevent it and stop it when it does happen.

Same reply as above ...

Over the years, we actually ran several free hosting services as well as paid hosting services and the longest one ran over a decade and in all that time, instances of abuse were EXTREMELY rare and we didn't have any of the typical problems with piracy, hacking, TOS violations, or any of the usual garbage you usually find most places.

Our actual secret was artificial intelligence. Every account and every connection was monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and some pretty advanced systems profiled every action that every user took good or bad. You violated any rule and you were generally gone in 8 seconds or less and most found that once banned, you couldn't come back even with proxy servers (favorite futile attempt) which was the masterpiece of the entire system.

Many suspected that we must have had an army of thousands of administrators watching their every move but actually the servers themselves were capable of watching everything, could self repair, make administrative decisions, profile users, and take counter actions to any user activity. The true capabilities of the system went far beyond that and there are very few who know just exactly the limits of those capabilities.

Though nothing is official and the talks are still in the early stages and will still be debated for a while, I can say that our main company (not the free host project) is currently toying with the idea of possibly licensing our AI monitoring technology out to other hosts. If that goes forward as currently being discussed, it could radically turn the entire hosting world upside down and that is also something being considered as well.

I guess the big question is and the reason for pointing it out here, would you as hosts out there even be interested in having that kind of technology if it were openly available to you under license?

 

[Lochstar11]

YES YES YES toad ,
But how is all that possible

 

[toad]

YES YES YES toad ,
But how is all that possible

How is all of WHAT possible?

Do you mean ...

Automating things?

Security? Technology?

Regarding the former, it's not that difficult to get most processes automated
and I'd be glad to give you a hand in that department if you need help.

If you are referring to the specialized technologies mentioned in my last post,
many of those were developed and inherited from our original company a
number of years ago and utilize proprietary technologies that have not as
of this date been released publicly (although that may be changing Shhh!)