[azoundria]

Greetings Everyone,

Over the last while I have been working on development of a new free host built on many concepts - some unique and others starting to get popular. I am posting here to get opinions of these concepts.

1) Full Ad Customization
Many free hosts force ads upon their webmasters - often in ways which interfere with the webmaster’s chosen page design. Not only does this annoy webmasters - it also reduces the number of visitors who visit these pages. With IsMyWebsite webmasters get to place their own ads - and even share in the profits their site makes.

2) Professional Tools
The more successful your site is, the more successful our host becomes. So why should you be limited to more basic tools? We provide our webmasters with all the tools they need and even add more as required.

3) IsMyWebsite Process
This idea is completely unique to our host - specifically designed to guide, encourage, and assist webmasters as they develop their website. Basically, there are 4 stages to building a website - planning, improving, expanding, and optimizing. As a webmaster advances between the account types they gain access to more features and resources.

4) Advisors
An advisor is a more experienced webmaster who knows many of the skills needed to design and grow a website effectively. Webmasters who join the host are partnered to an advisor who answers their questions and helps them out. Advisors receive a small share of the profits from sites they help - thus also encouraging them.

http://www.ismywebsite.com/

Any thoughts?

[ZendURL]

Moved to website reviews

[azoundria]

Ok. Thanks... Hopefully I get some replies...

[batcavenet]

Those all sound good except #2 which I would love to do- but all freehosts are in a constant battle with providing advanced features vs people abusing them

[azoundria]

That's why potentially dangerous features are earned by advancing in the IsMyWebsite process. Also, there are advisors to watch their client's websites. I don't think people are likely to spend hours developing a website only so they can attack a host. This is the type of abuse you were talking about right?

[ZendURL]

How would you know if they were spending hours developing their sites? If this site gets big enough to make any money there is no way you can approve and manage everybody's account.

[batcavenet]

I've been in the business a while- I just assume that anything people can do they will but the approval process might help some

[azoundria]

That is where advisors come in. They are my connection to my people. Each of them maintains constant communication with between 12 and 240 websites. They guide the webmasters, help them out, answer questions, and gather user opinion.

They are paid based on the profits of their supervised websites. Most likely 5%. Their goals are for the success of the sites and IsMyWebsite. New webmasters choose an advisor upon registration, and that advisor will know what type of site they're building and help them develop it.

-----

So just to gauge the effectiveness let's create a hacker scenario. We'll call him EvilBob. One day EvilBob happens upon a free host and decides he's going to be a pain and cause numerous people much suffering.

So he registers, chooses an advisor, and logs into CPanel. This advisor contacts him, says hi, and asks him what his plans for his site are. Now lets pretend EvilBob fakes an idea and tells the advisor, rewriting everything to sound really nice and stating he doesn't need any help. So the advisor says ok let me know when you've got something up.

So EvilBob accesses his Cpanel and builds a fake website just for the purposes of gaining further access. Or maybe he copies it from somewhere else and pretends it's his. About an hour later he's got something basic set up and contacts the advisor again.

At this point the advisor would probably give him a few suggestions to improve the site, and many hours later, EvilBob has finally created a good website to move on to the 'Improving' stage. He is recommended to get website reviews and input. Other webmasters come to give him input and he is recommended to post on other forums as well.

So he does all this, improving his site further, and making it generally a great site all around. He starts getting plenty of visitors, and by now if he's copied the site it would be pretty much his own. Finally his site stands up to all the reviews and people give all positive input. (For you see he is a really determined hacker who is willing to go to all this trouble)

And now, after weeks worth of work, he gets access to the potentially dangerous features and hacks the site for some reason - totally wiping out his own website and getting himself banned. The server is restored from a backup and people loose the changes for that day. Seriously, it was so worth it for that hacker! He probably feels really proud of himself.

See how it works?

[ZendURL]

And he gets the server password, deletes the password, hacks into MySQL, clears all other users data, all his IP records, etc. Furthermore he steals your other customers passwords, and sensitive information. Do you get where I am going?

Furthermore how would you recruit such advisors, and how in the world would you know if they are to be trusted? 5% for 100 sites is a rather measly sum, considering 99% of users won't generate more than $1 of income in a month. Furthermore how would you get high traffic websites? Wouldn't they be intelligent enough to know that they could get 100% of the revenue if they went with themselves? The idea is cool, but it seems rather inpractical.

[azoundria]

I will still be cautious about what features I provide - obviously I wouldn't give any features that would allow that.

As for recruiting advisors I already have a few interested people and I haven't even asked specifically who's interested. There are tons of people who like helping other webmasters for free - but now they can even make a little money while doing it.

I can remember my early webmaster days and how absolutely horrible my first website was (I had 6 visitors a week and 1/2 were me). I struggled for about a year before I found a webmaster forum and got things sorted out. The going was slow - until I had help.

If I had started with a free host like IsMyWebsite I wouldn't have wasted a whole year of my life. You wont believe what a difference having people give you input is. Even just one person who supports your website and wants it to succeed is great news.

There are hundreds of beginner mistakes to be made. And most beginners don't know where to turn for help. Here, help, advice, and encouragement are just a question away. If a webmaster starts with a good idea and works hard to achieve it, ending up with a site people like, then what's missing to produce a great website?

Sure, you can get paid hosting and keep 100% of the profits. Obviously, there are advantages to that. However you don't get the advice, the community, or the price. And anyways, if sites are planning on making the switch then I recommend Evenhosting to them - that's part of the deal I arranged.

That's a bit long but I hope it makes sense.