You may have read my previous post around here regarding some Free hosting for my non-profit charity sites. Thanks to 121host we have taken up some hosting. (And thanks to the others who replied)

This sparked a thought in me.

What if one was run, maintain and administer a charity hosting site? I am sure there are a lot of people out there who also want a non-profit organisation to have a cheap way of hosting their website?

This is just a thought at the moment. The only thing i can think is that obviously i would make no profit from it but i can forsee that i would just lose money from me paying for the hosting and for my time too?

I was thinking that a webhost might sponsor such a venture and supply the account- a resellers possibly? Is it likely that such a thing would happen?

such a venture might be interesting to implement if i had the backing? somthing like charityhosting.com (not sure if that domain is taken or not??)

Thanks for reading this.

Terry Jacobs

Well it's not a bad idea, but realistically what you're asking is that one person lose a great deal of money, as opposed to a large number of people losing a small amount of money each...

yeah i was thinking that!

The only sort of thing i could say against that is that, though this is probably a stereotype- charity sites are generally going to be low resource usage, low bandwidth sites. (obviously if you had somthign the the redcross website that would be a different case) I feel we are targetting a different niché here.

Though as i thought in the first place there isn't really a way this can break even unless some kind of sponsership?

Charityhosting.com is taken. :)

In fact, all of the good charity, and non-profit hosting names are already taken (excluding dashes and numbers of course). ;)

It's a good idea though.

This sounds like a worthwhile idea. If you ever get this started, I could possibly provide some hosting(though I am currently not a webhost/reseller)

Peter

*Not an ad, mods change this as you see fit*

I completely agree with the whole Charity Hosting offers. The way we do it, and not lose money, is we put Charity customers on existing web servers with plenty of space left on them. We give them the smallest plan we have (50mb and 1gb xfer) and let them run with that. If they need more (and they haven't yet), we'll probably bump them up some notches. It costs us peanuts because they consume peanuts. You can also write it off as charity contributions on your tax forms. The site owners are happy for the free hosting, you are happy for the (virtually) free PR, and it's all done for a great cause.

To have a server/company strictly for Charity Hosting would be difficult as you would have no way to recoup the cost of the server/company. But if you are running an existing company with existing servers with some room to grow, you should be just fine.

To me it seems that while the idea is a nice one, the way charity sites are already taken care of by the bulk of hosting companies online already makes it seem a little pointless. The 'weight' of providing an account for free is small when you're talking a small percentage of your customer base (we ourselves host a few), but to place all those sites in a single place is just going to lead to someone having to wear the costs. As it is now, most hosts here probably have at least one or two under their belt, and aren't going to risk going to the wall because of it.

In over a year on this forum I can't remember a single worthy cause not being picked up by someone.

Greg Moore