Ever get the feeling that you’re not doing enough with the resources you have? My brother-in-law “just recently wrote”:http://www.posegate.org/russ/Oct2005/givin_it_up/ that he’s thinking of moving over to a free “Blogspot”:http://www.blogger.com/start account–primarily because he’s trying to squeeze the most out of his single-income, graduate-student, baby-on-the-way budget.
It occurred to me that our use of our hosting account is way underutilzed: we’re using 19% of the web space we have available and we have three domains registered out of our unlimited domain hosting. Our host costs us about $115 a year (which doesn’t include incentives like the $40 gift certificate they just sent us), and Google just mailed us a check for $100 for “hosting their ads”:https://www.google.com/adsense/ for 18 months.
*Aside:* Why did Google send us this cash? As you can see, we haven’t hosted ads here since our “Wordpress migration”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2005/02/12/migrated-to-wordpress/ back in February. However, while Wordpress hosts the majority of the pages you see on this site, the MovableType HTML pages are still on the server (I never removed them), and they still get traffic from random search engines or bloggers. So, we’re basically getting paid for hosting ads that 90% of our visitors never see. This will change, though: now that I realize we can get real money for hosting these ads, we’ll be adding them to the Wordpress site real soon. 
Anyway, the long and short of it is that it costs a whopping $4.50 a month for us to host the blog here, and we’re not making the most of it. Donating some space is totally not a big deal for us at all, so I think we’ll do it if Russ wants in. What have you done with your free web space?
“What have you done with your free web space?”
Besides reselling space to other people (only a few now, though) i’m hosting websites and mailing lists for 2 local charity groups with my extra space and bandwidth.
Mike, is “subletting” web space outside of the terms of most hosting contracts? I know you have your own server, but I wonder if I charged for hosting a couple of sites if DreamHost would slap me with a cease & desist.
You’d have to read thier Terms of Service. http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html
Course, if you didn’t advertise, how would they know?
My ISP, serverbeach, encourages reselling space so long as you don’t sell shell accounts. (You can give a shell account to customers that need one to maintain what they are doing, just not allowed to sell just a shell acount).
The last provider i was on, site5, forbid reselling space for shared solutions. But on dedicated servers it was fine.
I bought a VC account way back when TextDrive was first being founded. It cost me like $200, which was an incredible deal.
Basically, I have cutting edge web hosting that meets and exceeds my needs, I have it for life, and I never have to pay another cent.
I’m not doing anything with my extra space, other than just knowing that it’s there for when and if I scale out my ambitions.
“Ryan”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2005/10/08/underutilized/#comment-1178, wow, that’s awesome. I also checked out the VC deal at TextDrive, but last month they wanted more like $400–which I might have paid, but they only offered a couple of GB of storage.
How is the administration over there? I heard they were offering a new Ruby-on-Rails control panel that they built in-house.
Speaking of ambitions, I just had an idea today that would be really interesting to go live with, but I got to realizing that in order for it to be worth it, it actually has to result in a net gain from my time and effort. This is, of course, as opposed to the blog, which pays for itself in terms of hosting, but that’s about it: the rest of my time gets sucked into a black hole. This is probably the subject of another post, though.
Ken,
The reason the new rounds cost so much is because they are already successful. They still do them basically cause they are nice people, and want their forum friends to be able to get in on it. I think Jason (their el Presidente) said he wants about 10% to be “friends” who they just host for kicks (i.e. free).
When I signed up, TextDrive didn’t exist. It was announced on Dean’s Textpattern site, and they decided to fund it via 200 $200 “VC” accounts. I think I’m #87. They sold all 200 in like a day or two.. lifetime hosting at a host that didnt even exist at the time. Purely purchased on speculation.
They used that $40k to fund and build something spectacular. It’s still bumpy, but the things they are doing are great. Even at $400, it would be worth it… but it takes patience. Sometimes things aren’t yet as stable as they will be.
And yeah, I ahve lots of ideas… but implementing them is another story.