Telstra shutting down free webhosting

[kinetic (Steve)]

Heads up to anyone with a private non-commercial website
with Bigpond (which BTW was always one of the services you
were entitled to, but not heavily advertised).....

They are shutting down this service in September and any
such service will come at an additional cost.....

regards,
Steve

[Enchilada]

Originally Posted by kinetic

They are shutting down this service in September and any such service will come at an additional cost.....

Typical.
Simple. Dump Telstra!!

[wasyoungonce (Brendan)]

They are paying for Sol's remuneration package

[Enchilada]

Originally Posted by wasyoungonce

They are paying for Sol's remuneration package

[Barrykgerdes]

Yahoo is also shutting down its free web site geocities at the end of the year.

Barry

[Alchemy (Clive)]

i have one with googlepages, its being closed down and moved somewhere else, they have offered to transport your stuff accross, at this point i dont know at any future cost.

[kinetic (Steve)]

Originally Posted by kinetic

Heads up to anyone with a private non-commercial website
with Bigpond (which BTW was always one of the services you
were entitled to, but not heavily advertised).....

They are shutting down this service in September and any
such service will come at an additional cost.....

regards,
Steve

Well they followed through on their threat....
It was announced to die mid september but it was still up
and working as of Oct 01.
Now all I get are 503/404 errors.

I have a full backup of the pages etc but haven't decided where
to put it back up.

I can still view some pages via Google cache but it gives broken links
now to all of my IIS threads where I put a pic etc.
Why didn't I think of that!
Now anyone reading my DIY posts for info will get broken links!

Steve

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

All I can say is move to a *real* ISP. Bigpond is a p.o.s.

Dave

[starlooker (Duc)]

Originally Posted by kinetic

They are shutting down this service in September and any
such service will come at an additional cost....

The reason for this must purely be greed, because it costs bugger all to host non-commercial webpages.

Almost all ISPs provide a 10mb personal webspace for free with the account. My ISP provides me with 30mb. How many people have personal webpages? 10%? 5%?

My maths is not the best, but a 1 Terrabyte($200?) drive can store 100,000 personal webpages(at a full 10 Mb each). If Big Pond has 2 million customers, 10% would be 200,000 people. So 2 Terrabytes($400?) is sufficient to handle the required space for data.

2 modern servers with quad core CPU and 4 GB of RAM could each have a 1 TB drive. The cost to have a 10Mb webspace would be an insignificant fraction of the cost of an ISP account with Telstra, so their only motivation is greed.

EDIT: And gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail etc. provide 1 GB space for email to hundreds of millions of people for FREE. Telstra made $4 Billion profit last year.

[MrB (Simon)]

Originally Posted by starlooker

Almost all ISPs provide a 10mb personal webspace for free with the account. My ISP provides me with 30mb.

My ISP (Westnet) provides 20MB.
iiNET provides 1GB to its NDSL customers.

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi
It is because there will be no competition. The biggest free (15MB) yahoo geocities is closing this month.

Barry

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

Originally Posted by Barrykgerdes

Hi
It is because there will be no competition. The biggest free (15MB) yahoo geocities is closing this month.

Barry

Barry - this is wrong. Those using the Telstra hosting were Bigpond paying customers. It was not free hosting open to anyone and everyone. Geocities was free hosting, open to anyone and everyone. Bigpond customers are paying, Geocities aren't. So, with that out of the way, let's compare Telstra to other ISPs, who have paying customers. The majority of these ISPs give their customers a smallish token of webspace areas to work with. For most "ma and pa" users, they either don't use it at all, or it's well and truly sufficient. So, to sum up, Bigpond is NOT without competition. They simply do not care. They are a monopoly, plain and simple.

The easiest way to fix this monopoly is to remove it - legalise it so that Telstra can only provide wholesale Internet and remove their retail outlet. You don't kill a snake by petting it, you cut its head off. Telstra regularly flaunts the Internet ombudsman (like the ACCC is a toothless tiger that should be axed in its current format) without a single ounce of care. Hell, Telstra did not abide by the rules for the recent Internet bids, so it didn't get it, and then it has the hide to sue the Australian Federal government!

How much did they pay that previous foreign tosser? Sorry, but he was overpaid, and it was totally unpatriotic to put a foreigner in as head of Telstra imho.

Dave

PS - the Internet ombudsman is a total waste of time. ISPs are forbidden to complain about other ISPs or wholesalers (Telstra, ZedRez and AAPT/Powertel to name a few of the big guns). Let's put an example there - an ISP orders an ADSL connection from a wholesaler. The wholesaler keeps screwing up, the end user complains against the ISP, cos they cannot directly complain against the wholesaler, and the retailer can't complain about the wholesaler. You tell me, does this sound like a fair system? It doesn't to me, but I rely on commonsense.

[stephenb (Stephen)]

I use and have setup websites for myself and others at www.webs.com for some time.

Their website builder is reasonably easy to use, they provide a good selection of templates, and although they are not altogether "ad-free", you can the advertisments are not overly intrusive. Mind you, you can pay USD$15 per year to go completely ad-free if you wish, which I have.

I have experimented with several "free" webhostings on the internet and decided on webs.com a while a go, and have been using them ever since.