[DaveMorton]

I'm seriously considering the possibility of creating a hosting site for independent botmasters to host their chatbots. Right now, this is nothing more than a somewhat nebulous idea, and it's certainly not something that I can do on my own, so the first order of business for me is to find out what sort of interest can be generated, and to make a request for volunteers to assist in the details of initiating a venture of this sort. I don't intend to be any sort of "real" competition for any currently established companies at this point. I just want to provide some features that are currently lacking. I have no other details right now. I first want to gauge whether or not there's enough interest to go forward, and then to see if I can acquire the people I would need to help make it a reality. So, whaddaya say? Would you be interested? If so, let me know, and outline what you would like to see, feature-wise, and what would you think would be a "fair price" for a "premium-level" hosting plan, and what enhanced features would be worth paying extra for. Any and all feedback here can't be anything but helpful.

[Freddy]

Well I don't know what I am getting into but I would be interested in helping some way.  As you might know I know some PHP and I am learning javascript.  I'm also not too bad at web design and can do graphics work.   

I'm not sure just yet what features etc I would like to see, I'll have a think, mainly I thought I would throw in my support early.

And of course we could certainly help promote this venture here.

[DaveMorton]

Thanks, Freddy. I'll keep that in mind, and keep you posted on the situation as things change.

[Mohit]

For initial study, why don't we make a Poll here itself so that we can get an idea what the people are thinking about it :-)

I wanted a Blog cum Bot hosting facility which I am not able to find. By bot hosting I mean a small area of my own, which I can customize on my own free will and which can be associated easily with my blog or cms so that I can post regular updates on it.

Here is how my website should look like

1) A custom welcome page, which will be generally the home page.
2) 2 sidebars, on the left and right, both customizable, and a top horizontal menu bar.
3) A link which leads to my blog, and a widget which can show my latest blog posts, or updates of bots.
4) There should be some more widgets, for the convenience of a bot master, like click, upload and go. IN my case, I would like a upload button, which uploads my JAR file, embeds my applet to current page and my bot starts talking :-P.
5) A custom file manager on the website would be required as I will want to see the files on my space.
6) A mail id, this can vary from Newbie to Premium service.
7) Versioning, if you can manage. If somebody wants to release the bot in different version. This can be optional, but would be very helpful.
Different widgets which makes life easy :-) Whatever given here is useful.
9) For PHP developers, A descent editor will be very good. Just in case they want to make small changes, they can do it then and there. If you can make something like Eclipse (colors for different things, indenting) for Java, I would be the happiest person in the world.  

Right now I can think only this much.  

I can't comment on the price as I am not very familiar with the web hosting plans. But feature-wise you can extend web-space, email ids, badwidth, Maximum databases allowed etc etc. For keeping only the latest version on the website, a 100MB or even less will be more than enough. For the botmasters who want to keep each and every version alive, can have more than that.


One Suggestion. You can generalize it up to an extent. Not only bots, but people want to demostrate several web-based application of theirs, do the versioning and accept comments and enhancements. I have seen some kids who are in college, and who want only 10-20MB space for them to try out PHP or .NET on the web. This is only for people who want to try out, so they want it as cheap as it could be.

I think a domian name comes around USD 10 and i don't know about 10MB space(might be $1 or 2 per month, something like that). So approximately, if you can sell a 50MB space with a domain name, in this manner for programmers who want to try things out in say USD 30 for 1  year, it looks like a nice package to me.

I might go wrong with my approximations of expenditure at web hosting,I think if somebody sell it in small packages for specific programming needs, it would help many programmers who don't go live just because it is heavy on their pockets. Those who work professionally, well you will already have loads of features there for botmasters atleast, for which they will be spending a few extra bucks.

This was just a thought. Please correct me if I am wrong somewhere.


EDIT - You can count me in if you are having some Java work there. I am trying to learn Ajax, but still trying :-) And for testing and other small things I am always there.

[Data]

Mohit, some good ideas, and some useful info there. 

Webspace is now much cheaper than it was, you could get 1 Gig for around the $10 a month mark, maybe even better if you shop around, so if you start a website and go for a smaller amount of space, like Mohit says you don’t need a lot, you could actually get it for something like 3 to $4 a month. Not much at all really. Just make sure the provider you go for can run all the software that you think the site might need and has a 99.9% up-time, nothing more annoying than a site that goes down all the time. 

As for how you would make a site to host chatbots, hmm that would require some thinking time. But I think it’s a neat idea.

[DaveMorton]

Thanks, folks, for your replies. I'm going to be thinking about this project a lot over the next few weeks and months, and I'd like to get as much feedback about it as possible. So please give me your thoughts and impressions.

[Bragi]

It would probably need something extra in the services area, I guess, if you want to compete against all those providers that offer durt cheap hosting.