January 2, 2007...11:53 am

Web hosting idea: Ads on over-drawn accounts

When you host your website on a shared account like Bluehost, you’re given a certain allocation of bandwidth, disk space, and CPU power. If you go over, they shut you down, which is almost certain to happen if your website makes it to the front page of Digg or Slashdot. (Hence the “Slashdot effect” or “your site has been Slashdotted”.)

We’ve seen this several times at Freemacware.com. Our Bluehost account couldn’t keep up with the “Digg effect” so we’d get “CPU overage” errors. (Turns out Bluehost’s awesome bandwidth and disk space allowances aren’t so hot if the CPU can’t keep up. And they don’t offer any upgrades.) We moved to MacMiniColo.net and things have been much better.

(As an aside, we now have enough readers at Freemacware.com that when we link to small-time web sites, we occasionally cause account overages.)

From the consumer point of view, it’s annoying to find something interesting on Digg and then not be able to read it because the account is maxed out.

MY POINT
When you max out your account, it’s stupid for web hosting companies to show an error message. It’s a lost marketing opportunity. Web hosting companies ought to display an ad touting themselves and a sponsor, and then redirect to your site. For example:

Welcome Digg readers. This web site has used more than its share of bandwidth, but we’d like you to see it anyway. You’ll be redirected in 5 seconds. Brought to you by ACME hosting company and XYZ corporate sponsor.

If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for reading.

7 Comments

Filed under Interesting, Main, Tech

7 Comments

  • Pete Abilla
    January 2, 2007 at 12:09 pm
    That’s an excellent idea.
  • Goozbach
    January 2, 2007 at 12:21 pm
    What a great idea. Now to figure a way of implementing it.
  • Christer Edwards
    January 2, 2007 at 1:09 pm
    That would be a good idea. I don’t know why a host would simply cut you off though, why not simply add to the bill for additional bandwidth?

    Caching your site can go a long way though. I’ve been to the front page of Digg twice in the last month (and del.icio.us) and I’m hosting from home! keeps my server running like a champ (for my wordpress sites).

  • danithew
    January 2, 2007 at 1:33 pm
    That is a brilliant idea. The person still gets hosting in exchange for brief advertising - which demonstrates the professional goodwill of the host.
  • Connor
    January 2, 2007 at 3:58 pm
    Proposed ad:

    “Our hosting plans are so crappy that we had to shut down the site you were trying to visit.

    Sign up today!”

    :)

  • Connor
    January 2, 2007 at 4:16 pm
    Oops.

    I didn’t see your example. I think because of the subtle gray background, I confused it for the box below it and thought it was metadata stuff.

    I actually like your example. I thought you were proposing showing the ad and nothing else, thus letting the hosting company take advantage. But I think the short ad plus redirect would be a great future, and good karma for both parties.

  • Sheri Bigelow
    January 3, 2007 at 9:39 am
    Expanding on your idea, what if the hosting company wanted to add other advertising such as AdWords? It could provide an even higher incentive for the hosting company if they could monetize on top of “good will” advertisements on maxed out accounts. However, some clients might scoff at the idea of the host making an extra few bucks based on their good fortune. Here’s an idea though, PART of the extra proceeds could be applied to the account, and when enough $$ was obtained, the site is reinstated despite the overage. I wonder how many sites and how much outage time logged in a given month for a host like bluehost.

Leave a Reply