CNet News reports that freespeech.org, a non-profit progressive web hosting service, is halting their free web hosting as a result of increasing costs and popularity. Their fee-based hosting service will continue.
In their report CNet compares freespeech.org to commercial services, like Yahoo’s GeoCities, which are trying to move from free to fee–a comparision that I think misses the mark some. Most notably, GeoCities was never intended to be a non-profit free service, but rather intended to make its money through advertising, a strategy that hasn’t worked out as planned. CNet also fails to note that freespeech.org is not simply a web hosting service. It’s specialty is hosting streaming media, especially video, which requires significantly more bandwidth than web pages, and therefore much more expensive. Given this, it’s amazing that freespeech.org has been able to offer a free service this long. Still, their fee structure is very much a bargain, with 100 MB of streaming media storage for $15.00/month and no bandwidth limits.
Nonetheless It’s too bad that freespeech.org had to pack up its free service, since distributing streaming media on the ‘net is still a pretty expensive enterprise. I hope that maybe they can put together a “scholarship” or grant system whereby they can provide free hosting for organizations from depressed or more impoverished areas. I would contribute to that.
Unfortunately this goes to show that the economic downturn can affect non-profits as well, even if not in quite the same way. It’s a reminder that we need to keep these organizations in mind (and in our checkbooks) if we value an independent and non-profit internet.
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