How to Offer Free E-mail and Web Space from Your Site
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by
Peter Cooper
Free Web
Space
As with free e-mail, free Web space was rare to find
in the early years of the Web, probably more so. Any services you could find were
likely to be academic or demographically linked (Australians only, for example)
and offered pitiful amounts of space, often around a quarter of a megabyte!
If
Hotmail kicked off free e-mail, then GeoCities
kicked off free Web space. Initially they offered a simple 2mb package which was
warmly welcomed by all. Over time, Geocities has improved its line of services
(they now offer 15 megabytes of space for free), and was bought out by Yahoo!
Inc.
The popularity of Geocities helped spawn hundreds of other
free Web space providers, which are now a dime a dozen. Free web space providers
are in a difficult position though, as they fight to make sure that their space
isn't used for illegal or immoral purposes. Most are concerned about pornography
and pedophilia that may end up on their space, so they are usually forced to check
their systems regularly as they could be held partially accountable if charges
were pressed.
The difference between web space and e-mail is
that people are less likely to use a free Web space service simply because they
'like your community'. The thing that attracts most people to free Web space is
having better features than other free Web space providers. Of course, there's
still a large audience of people who don't have Web pages and are interested in
producing something. If your audience contains a large number of these sorts of
people (perhaps you run a site for Web novices) then your free Web space feature
could be immensely popular, whereas if you run a site for Web developers (like
iBoost) they probably won't be so impressed.
