Free hosting for FIRST team websites?

Technical Website Design/Showcase
1

As a member of the Entity Hosting staff, we were thinking about offering free web hosting to a limited number of FIRST teams. This number has been undecided as well as the matter of wether we will be offering this service.

Considered package:

  • 250MB - 1 GB Hard Disk Space
  • 1 - 5 GB monthly bandwidth
  • PHP, Perl, JSP, SSI and some other stuff
  • 3 Domains
  • 25 - unlimited email addresses
  • Mailing list
  • Plesk 7 Control Pannel
  • FreeBSD

We are looking for input to this as it will possibly affect our descsion to offer such a package. Any I deas or thoughts please post them.

2

My team (647) has been looking into getting a web host sense there are to many restrictions on the schools website so we wanted to not use it. This would be a great service to a lot of teams if you can make it very easy to manage and set up as I know there are some teams that do not have any web building experience.

3

It is definately something noble to do for teams who cant afford a website. I am sure there are teams who wish they had a website, but just had no money to buy a domain… or some who host for free, with countless restrictions with places like tripod, geocities etc.

4

My team would love to take you up on this, as our free hosting server is in the process of closing it’s doors… :frowning:

5

This looks great and a really nice offer. Just a FYI: Our team uses 4 e-mail lists, general, leadership, mentors, and parents.

But, this is free so I really shouldn’t go around suggesting anything to make it better. However, I would say that you are probably more reliable than our current host, so we may move to you if you choose to open up this option.

6

I’m sure that if you do this, teams will be very thankful… I know of many who have had issues getting the extra few dollars for hosting. This would help many of them out. Thanks for the contribution!

7

This would be a great service to teams. Right now, my team is using Angelfire :frowning: Really, all we would need would be about ~50 megs of space, 4-5 gb bandwidth, and PHP, JSP, and CGI abilities.

It would be really, REALLY cool of you could get something like this running.

8

Please keep posting ideas that you can think of. I like what I am seeing here.

We are looking at giving away 10-50 accounts on a first come basis. Some things to remember is that you will have to get your own domain or use a subdomain with us. Also you will probally may not be entitled to our technical support.

But, if you take a look at our site it will probally be a hybread of lite and standard packages.

http://www.entityhosting.com/

9

This would be a great resource to many teams, mine included :slight_smile:

It seems like PHP and CGI abilities would be most important, as most teems use PHP pages.

Would mySQL be included? Just asking.

10

I am not familar with the “Plesk 7 Control Panel” is that like a web based do everthing page? Like modify e-mail addresses, aliases, e-mail groups, set up sub-domains, etc?

This sounds very cool!

Just for my own ooo’ing and ah’ing, what kind of connection is this hosted off of? T1? T3?

11

Would we be able to set up our own forums using something like YaBB with cgi-bin access or what CD uses?

12

I have some good hosting already, but we are in need of some more space. I’d be very interested in some webspace at least.

13

Would mySQL be included? Just asking.
Yes it would, along with PostgreSQL

I am not familar with the “Plesk 7 Control Panel” is that like a web based do everthing page? Like modify e-mail addresses, aliases, e-mail groups, set up sub-domains, etc?
Plesk does allow you to control everything that you may need for you site such as batabases, subdomains, and mail and webmail.

Would we be able to set up our own forums using something like YaBB with cgi-bin access or what CD uses?
Each account would support full server-side scripting such as Perl and PHP so there shouldn’t be a problem with running a message board.

Just for my own ooo’ing and ah’ing, what kind of connection is this hosted off of? T1? T3?
We have OC-47s from several providers such as SBC, AT&T, Sprint, and Level 3. You can look at our co-location providers website if you wish. http://castleaccess.com/network.htm

14

Has this offer been approved by your company?
If so, do you know when you plan on making it available?
[Post 300!]

15

I do believe our team would be very grateful to have a service such as this. As I know very little about web page design/creation and/or hosting issues, I can’t comment on the specific offering. But I know our web guys have been having difficulty with access to update/modify our current site because it is hosted by one of our sponsors, and the web team doesn’t have any direct access.

16

I’m sure my team would love to save the money of paying for webspace. The school district would not allow any scripting and so we had to go out and pay for a good server, but a free one would be far better for us…

17

Good news… we will take 10 teams as a trial to see how it works out.

The accounts will be on a FreeBSD 4.9 machine running Plesk 7.0.2

  • 2 domains
  • 5 subdomains
  • 500 MB Disk Space
  • 5 GB/s Monthly transfer
  • 5 databases mysql/pgsql
  • unlimited mail accounts
  • unlimited mailing list
  • Plus PHP, Perl, and Tomcat(JSP)
  • Domain registration $10
  • Support will be limited to server problems only

I’ll post a PDF that will be needed to be filled out by the team head coach with some team information.

Till then sit tight…