So, I decided to start writing a blog about a couple of my side projects. Today’s entry is about my hosting project which is currently called / hosted at holaservers.com. It is a beta (perhaps alpha) version of a free hosting site that I have wanted to do for ages. It is what I spend much of my should be sleeping time, working on. Little by little, I have been getting stuff going, and as of right now, I have seen (at least once) the following work on the site:
- signup and get verified via a nice little email
- create subdomains of holaservers.com or “transfer” domains on in
- use ftp to manage files
- use TinyMCE to edit files
- get credit for referring a friend
- enjoy!
May not sound like much, but heck, I think it is pretty cool. Probably the coolest thing is that I use Amazon’s S3 for my storage. I currently have none of the hosting stored locally. I used to think I would keep the S3 part kind of secret, cause, I don’t know, I thought people could easily rip off the idea, but the more I have done, the more I think I will just be open about stuff. Well, pretty open.
A little QA.
Q: Why the heck would you start another web hosting site? Aren’t there like thousands or tens of thousands of them out there?
A: Yeah, sure. So, that’s a pretty good argument for me that one more might be ok 🙂 I once heard that for every taco bell in the US, there is also a hedge fund. No idea where they sit in some of them, but there you go.
Q: Why else?
A: Well, I worked at a hosting company for over seven years, generally liked it and would like to try some things that I wasn’t really ever able to do. Kind of hard to move a big ship. We used a net app for our storage and that (I think) limited some possibilities for us. Some decisions that were made early on made later change near impossible. Simple things like your domain name being your login led to oh so many resulting troubles. So, on holaservers, your email is your login. See? You’re getting the picture already.
Also, there are also at least a couple viral things I would like to try out around a little points system I have pondered for ages.
I would also like to start to grow a user base to help out with other projects, like shopthar. Along similar lines, if I can get something below going, I think I could get some pretty good page rank on a few sites, which would help all the way around.
Q: How do you earn points?
A: For now, the plan is you can earn points by
- helping a friend signup and verify via your referral link
- helping a friend upgrade to a hostmonster account via your referral link
- registering one of your non-holaservers sites as pointing to a spack approved site and having my system find your link
- having your above site / link show up in a google link: query via their api
Q: Points? What are you going to do with that (those)?
A: The vision is that with points you may be able to
- get more space for your account
- get the first year free for your hostmonster account
- earn a chunk of holaservers’ hostmonster revenue, perhaps 1 or 5%
Q: What was that last one?
A: For a given month, let’s say holaservers earned $100,000 from hostmonster referrals, you had earned 10% of the total points and it is decided to share 5% of the revenue. Well then, you would take home $500. That would be pretty cool for the both of us! What if holaservers had earned $1,000,000,000 from hostmonster referrals in a month? That’s right, $5,000,000! Even cooler!
Q: Wow, great ideas! Why not go for some venture capital and quit your day job?
A: Kind of have this dream of running my own company, hiring folks I want to hire, perhaps not retaining folks that don’t work out, working on cool things, trying out cools ideas I have or hear, treating folks right, making some good money, the whole time trying to be a good, fair, honest, hard working man; pretty well the best boss and owner ever. Kind of have this fear that if I go for VC the above dream could just drift away and I end up sitting in some meeting with my former folks and perhaps other folks yelling at each other about who knows what, while telling me that they aren’t going to implement whatever I had just been talking about. Course I also have this memory of working on pretty cool stuff the last like ten years that has hardly made the light of day because I can generally only work on it at night, so pick your poison 🙂
Q: What about your day job?
A: Yeah, gonna keep that. I mean hey it is totally different. For my day job I write a Java Eclipse Rich Client application that will help missionaries and the like take more / better pictures at archives and the like. This project is Perl on the server. How much more different could they be?
Q: Isn’t it all just programming?
A: What? Are you even a programmer?
Q: Don’t you have a beautiful wife and family, including a little sub-year old baby? When do you find the time to get anything done?
A: Yes, and pretty much after they go to bed 🙂
On this blog, I want to kind of keep track of challenges we face and hopefully overcome here at holaservers. Join us! If you sign up for an account over at holaservers.com.
Enjoy!
Earl