Tips on completing your hosting request
The Question: I often get emails asking for tips on getting a membership with us, or from people who have been denied membership wanting to know what they can change in their request to get an account in their next request.
In General… My number one response is that they need to wow us. Make us want to host your website. It is important to remember that you are requesting something of value for free, and that free thing is costing us effort and money. The people providing and evaluating whether to give you an account gain nothing but a warm fuzzy feeling from giving you an account, and have spent years of volunteering work and donating money to give you an account. Should you receive an account your next door neighbor on the server will be cancer charities, children’s basketball clubs, and many hundreds of other sites that in very obvious ways help other people. With that in mind, we ask that you show respect for the process by taking your time to thoughtfully and completely fill out your request.
Some Specifics
All of that aside, I can give some more concrete advice. I can currently think of 6 things our our review committee looks for while reading over and discussing requests:
- Sites do not violate any of our rules.
- Sites will not consume more bandwidth and storage space than we can spare.
- Sites do not require any software or server privileges that we do not provide.
- The requester has the skills to use the hosting account.
- The requester is able to articulate a clear vision of their website.
- The last thing we are looking for is a bit more vague. We want to host websites that resonate with our mission. We want to host sites that provide some sort of service to a larger community. The requester needs to feel excited enough about their concept and its capacity to do something special that they are able, through their request to us, get our review committee excited about hosting them. The service aspect is checked by the resources potentially used by the proposal. If a site will only use a tiny bit of bandwidth and storage space the bar to wow us is low; if a site has big resource needs then we need to know that the site’s use of so much community resources will be used for something truly inspiring and worthwhile.
Common Errors
Some common errors that people make in their requests:
- Providing us with such terse responses to our question and answer section that we can’t evaluate their site and also feel like the requester does not value or respect our service.
- Not informing us why other hosting services would not be more appropriate. Often people just want a simple blog. WordPress.com, Blogger and other services would be more appropriate for people just wanting to dip a toe into blogging. Many students don’t let us know why their school’s hosting is inadequate. Most school districts and Universities provide hosting to their students (In fact one of our systems administrators built the system his high school district now uses). We want to know that a student has explored these options first and has come to a logical conclusion as to why our service is the best place for their site. Some software developers don’t tell us why services such as sourceforge or github would not be the best place for their site.
- Wanting to use our service as a sandbox for development. Since we provide such a variety of development languages, frameworks, databases, and other software we get many requests from people who want to learn some of these technologies we offer and use our hosting as a testbed or development environment. That sort of work should be done on a person’s local machine not on a production server actively serving thousands of websites.
- Wanting short term hosting. Our service is not for short term hosting. We often get requests from students who want/need to post class projects online for their instructors to evaluate. This short term hosting is not something we do, and frankly we feel instructors who require this of their students while not providing the hosting resources are being unreasonable.
