Question: What is subhosting?

Answer: Subhosting is the practice of lending out part of one's own webspace to others, which they may then use for pages of their own.

Question: So, like the sub-users get passwords?

Answer: (Laughs). No, nothing that elaborate. The sub-user (the person whose pages one hosts) either mails the site owner some pages, or puts them at a pre-arranged url, where the site owner finds them and then copies them. Either way, the site owner then uploads those pages onto his own site.

Question: He does this in exchange for pay?

Answer: No, generally not. At most Internet Service Providers, to do so would be a violation of the Terms of Service and grounds for ending the site owner's service.

Question: Then what's in it for the site owner?

Answer: Hits. Links. The pages uploaded to his site will have links back to his own material. The links others make to the pages he is subhosting send traffic his way and help his own search engine rankings.

Question: And what's in it for the person whose material is being subhosted? It sounds like he's just adding to somebody else's site.

Answer: What's in it for us when we lease space from our providers? Strictly speaking, the Halls of Eternal Disbelief are part of Newsguy's site, aren't they? And yet I get use out of this space.

What the sub-hosting client gets out of this is convenience, and possibly savings. Most free webspace providers will offer their customers 20 Meg or more worth of space, and the paid ones often go past 30 Meg. Yet, if you look at most of the sites out there, many use no more than a few hundred thousand K, and in the case of simple text sites, that often goes down to maybe a few tens of thousands of K. This, again, is part of why the site owner agrees to subhost : he really isn't giving up that much space.

As for the subhosting client : the massive space allotment does user very little good, and yet he must pay for all of it if he is to have a site of his own. Worse still, many free providers will delete pages that aren't updated once every few months or which aren't visited for a while. This becomes a major nuisance for somebody whose entire site may consist of a handful of simple pages that he just wants to put up and forget. Subhosting allows them a way around this headache.

Question: But isn't this bad for the ISPs? Instead of them selling service on many accounts, now they sell on only a few.

Answer: Not at all. Nobody is going to agree to subhost a three meg site, or at least very few people will. Those whose pages are going to be subhosted, by and large, are people who would have given up on the thought of even having a webpage. This practice isn't taking any business away from the paid ISPs which they would have anyway, and it is putting material back online which would otherwise have not been seen, and bringing people back online who would have otherwise been less likely to take part in the online community.

This is a win-win proposition, no matter how you look at it.

Question: So who would be allowed to have his material subhosted on this site? What are the criteria?

Answer: From my point of view, this is somewhere between a business relationship and a personal one. I ask a few simple questions about the applicant:




  1. Realistically, is subhosting his material going to help me promote my site ? Will it draw hits, and tend to rise in the search engine rankings itself?


  2. In general, do I like what it is that this person wants to do with the space? Or, even if I disagree with his objectives, can I at least respect what he is doing enough to agree to disagree? What kind of light will hosting his material cast my own site in?


  3. Just how much space is he asking for, and how much of a hassle is going to be involved here? Is this guy going to want me to update his page daily? Are there going to be massive graphics that my cheesy little FTP program will have problems with, requiring repeated attempts?

The mail form pages from the alternative Burning Man groups were a great example of subhostable material. They are unlikely to be revised for some years to come, they leave me linked to sites (the archive pages over at Yahoogroups) that have a proved search engine performance, and the cause couldn't be better : promoting uncensored communication in the Burning Man community. Personally, I'll be pleasantly surprised if these forums succeed, but what the hell? Somebody might as well try, and I'm not laying out that much space.

Question: Is there space for more subhosting clients here in the new Halls of Eternal Disbelief, at Newsguy?

Answer: There sure is, and as soon as I've set up my mailforms, I'll be interested in seeing if I have any takers. (Those who'd rather not wait for that can drop by my homelist, and post a request there).

Figure that 1 Meg is over 600 pages worth of text. I may not be one of these people with a 30 K site, but realistically, am I going to write 6000 pages worth of text any time soon? Probably not. I am going to start putting more pictures and sound files on this site, eventually, and that will eat up the space, but as my income goes up, I should be able to upgrade to a larger site with a higher traffic allotment long before I run out of space.

And really - this is the only way to get the new Halls of Eternal Disbelief to come up in some of the rankings. I've been delighted by its showing in AllTheWeb.com, Excite and Webcrawler, in which it recovered quickly after censorship and poor server performace over at Internet Trash forced me to seek new space, basically relocating this site. But its showings in Yahoo and Google have been anemic. What is left of the original Halls of Eternal Disbelief (at Internet trash) seems to do reasonably well in those engines but, scary thought that it is, the original Halls are actually a fairly old site, having been around for most of the history of the World Wide Web. I'm sure the new site, being the old site with new material added, will rise in these search engines eventually, but that may be a long time off as things stand.

Which is why, from my point of view as a webmaster, the status quo is unacceptable, and why subhosting isn't just acceptable as a choice, but almost mandatory. In this I suspect that I am far from alone, given the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the large number of webmasters seeking new locations for their material : a small flood which I would suggest is bound to grow into a larger one, judging from the chronic mismanagement of the free providers, and their indifferent service to webmasters and visitors alike. The "Old New" economy never worked because too much was dependent on work being done gratis, and those who everybody else depended on never got a sense of who it is that they were supposed to be working for. The Web now seems to be restructuring itself in a more practical, businesslike way as webmasters and their sites find their way to low cost, but professional services like Newsguy.

In the confusion that can't help but follow, I think that you're going to find that subhosting is going to go from being the eyebrow raising novelty that it is now, to being routine. At least, I hope so, because otherwise a lot of traffic and search engine rankings are going to drop through the floor, and a lot of the webmasters out there are going to have a devil of a time finding each other. This would tend to undermine the networking that makes the Web work, as webmasters find other sites likely to be of interest to their visitors, and in linking to them, help build a cohesive network of sites that both people and search engines can find their way along. (On the other hand, subhosting moves the process of networking along automatically, because the sites subhosted have already "found" the site they are being subhosted on).

If online networking breaks down, so does this, and so does the Web, or at least the part of it that amateur efforts like this one make up. Sure, there will still be the high-budget efforts that have their own servers, but is that a direction we should want to see the Web move in : all traffic channeled through a relative handful of sites, giving that relative handful of webmasters effective control over the Web as a whole? (A site that is not seen might as well not exist).

This is a possible future for the Internet which I would hope we would avoid, and if the ISPs are smart, they're going to try to avoid it, too. A web gone almost wholly corporate isn't going to appeal to the kind of people who make amateur websites, ie. the mainstay of their business. Conclusion : this is one case where the individual incentives aren't especially perverse, and the greatest good will be best served by a moderately enlightened self-interest. One need do no more then get people thinking about what would be good for themselves, and why it would be good for them, and everything should work out. But, as usual, they are going to have to be willing to think.

Click here to enter the Halls of Eternal Disbelief.