I just got a new site and have unlimited bandwidth and space so I figured instead of letting it go to waste I may as well start a freebie hosting thing through FTP. What do you all think? I just see a few posts in the Poser forum now and again needing hosts and figured people would be interested.

I seem to recall a post not long ago, where someone wondered aloud how many freebies have been lost over the years by sites going down, etc.

It was speculated that it would be cool to have freebies gathered together. I think the plan would have evolved into getting together freebies no longer available on websites, but designated as freely redistributable per thier readMEs, into a community archive.

If you have unlimited bandwidth, that might lend itself to something like this! Is this something you would consider? If so, would you be able to configure so that there was a depository for people to upload freebies?

jest wondering :)

Logan

dratted typos

Message edited on: 08/04/2004 16:47

I think that's a very generous offer! I'd certainly be interested.

Me too! I only have one direct-linkable server, and its bandwidth is limited to a paltry 55MB daily o_O When I uploaded my first (and so far only ;) ) two freebies, the bandwidth ran out by noon every day for several days. =/

Yoo Hoo, my space is getting ready to expire. Where did you get unlimitted bandwidth???

read the fine print and if the fine print doesn't say then ask them if it is ok if you have over 50 gigs of bandwidth a month and see if they don't tell you no way..... Most of the services advertising unlimited bandwidth say something different in the fine print and the one that I found that didn't refer to it in the fine print said no after I emailed them asking..... I just think you should make this clear before you go to all that work to get the site together and then get hit with an unexpected charge.....

I hope you know what you're taking on! But if it gets going, you can post any of my freebies currently on Renderosity or my own site. I can also probably offer a few that aren't currently available. Regards, Maz

Agrreing with the earlier post. It's a generous offer, but I've seen many cases, over the years, where ISPs offer "unlimited", then shut you down and slap on huge fees, because the fine print says they can discontinue or alter the agreement at any time, for any reason. And the reason is always the same: you exceed 1 GB per day, 1 GB per month, or whatever arbitrary limit they come up with.

Im wondering if what im reading that the ISPs are doing can possibly be legal????

OK so an ISP bald face lies and says "free and unlimited" in thier add. I can belive this. Fine print says that they can discontinue or alter the agreement at will. I can very easily belive this.

Shut you down cause they decide they no longer want to host a site that uses a lot of bandwidth? Yeah I can belive this.........

but to shut down AND charge?????? Just one damn minute!!

I cannot see how this can possibly be legal. If an ISP can say you may have this for free all month, have you sign for it, then say sorry it WAS free all month but we decided instead to bill you $200 for the free service. Says we can alter details right here in the fine print. Pay up.

How can this be legal? There must be some legal precident for some sanity in this situation. If they can decide that you signed for something free of charge but instead they are going to bill you $200.00, whats to stop them from turning around and saying theyve decided to charge you $2000.00 for what you signed up for as free? whats to stop them from saying sorry its gonna be $20,000.00????? Who decides how much is fair and how much is balogna?

If they can seriously apply a bill to an advertised free service just by using "may apply changes to aggreement" in thier contract and blotch anyone's credit for any amount of money they choose to, how can there be successful business happening, well, anywhere??? If an ISP can do it, any business can do it, and who is going to sign any kind of contract with any business ever again??? That "offer may chage" certainly must be tacked on to other service aggreements that people sign, just how much power does it give to a business???

Is this just an example of some kind of fly by night shady business practice that exploits an unregulated or unrestricted aspect of the business world? Are we gonna see an epidemic of "webhosts" that do nothing more than sign as many people as they can to "free services" then turn around an charge them for all they can thru this fine print contract crap?

As you can tell, I know squat about business law, and this just pummells the hell out of my common sence, such as it is. Id really love to hear from someone that knows something about this. As a consumer, it sounds horribly wrong to me.

Logan

Message edited on: 08/04/2004 19:46

I think that free sites, like free love, are often the most expensive..;) it's the one thing that's kept me from launching Untextured Huffheinz/Low Polly Productions..;)

Well as for bandwidth, there were various bandwidth plans to choose from. There was 1 20GB/month one, a 50GB one and an unlimited one so I am pressuming that bandwidth wont be an issue, I will contact them and ask just in case. pizazz, http://emwebserver.com/cpanel.html is the link if you are interested. The main problem that I have is that as it is a new host, Im not sure about reliability and stuff like that but everything seems to been running ok for the last few weeks. Thanks for your replies, I feel a lot more inspired to do this now lol. Im hoping that I can somehow configure a 'guest' FTP account to only be able to upload a file and now mess with other peoples. I will make another post here when its all up and running (if i can get it too all work out lol).

One other word of caution, not to be pessimistic, but to hopefully help avoid a problem. You will want to consider a way to monitor or control what is uploaded. More than one generous person has been shut down due to warez kitties uploading stuff they shouldn't. Otherwise, your offer sounds wonderfully generous, and I wish you all the best in your endeavor!!! Shogakusha

Im using a forum to allow for things ike this such as reporting files that dont work, file previews etc. This does depend alot on users though. I will also try to get some other admins to help me if I find that I am not able to keep up with stuff ^.^.

"One other word of caution, not to be pessimistic, but to hopefully help avoid a problem. You will want to consider a way to monitor or control what is uploaded." Very good point, but very easy to address, I would think: -Uploads would be to a depository folder that is NOT downloadable from, only uploadable. All items in here to be individually examined by site admin(s) and moved one by one to the publicly accessable download directory after its determined its not a warez item Will slow down accessability of newly uploaded items only as long as it takes to pre-examine them, but seems well worth it to protect the public freebie archive concept! Logan

I was gonna not pre-examine the files first but I guess if my idea does become popular then there will eventually be a problem with warez. Thanks for pointing this out to me =).

I have offered to host files for community members. My server that hosts the files is under a 24/7 contract in a data center. I mostly have unlimited storage space & unlimited bandwith usage thanks to my contract. I have the individuals ftp into a server in my house. I quickly look over the files to make sure they are what they say they are then upload them to the other server. Once the file is uploaded I contact the individual with the server address. This system works great for me because I have a small number of individuals that I host. I wouldnt mind hosting more but alot of people prefer to utilize communities that provide freebie hosting.

Logan: "Uploads would be to a depository folder that is NOT downloadable from" How would you do that? I haven't seen that option when creating an ftp account...

Hello Dizzie, Ive never done this myself, but what made me think of it was the old grc.com page on the "classic DOS attack". While Mr Gibson was trying to discover what was being used to hammer his site, he created on his webpage an "anonymus trojan depository" in which anyone that had found a virus file on thier system could upload it to there for him to examine later. This in fact led to a spawn of the exact irc bot trojan that was involved in the attacks on his site being uploaded and the results were historic! (check out his pages at www.grc.com) Anyhow, I have to assume someone as security concious as Steve Gibson would never allow this trojan directory to be accessed by anyone but himself, So I figgure it must be possible to create a directory in an FTP server that can be written to but not read from. The configuration of this directory is most likely going to be done thru the FTP server or perhaps thru the permissions of the server Operating System (most likely a linux box of some distro or another) Ill check out some documentation for the linux OS I use and also pass the question along to some linux gurus I know. Logan

OK ive hit up Mr. Bob McClure Jr. Linux Guru Extrodinarre :) I asked him specifically about Read Only and Write Only linux FTP directory configuration, and this is what the kind gentleman had to reply: "This is the standard setup for anonymous FTP. Say the FTP root is /var/ftp. There will be a /var/ftp/incoming which is write-only by the world. That's where the uploads go. There is also a /var/ftp/pub/ which is read-only to the world. That's where downloads are taken from. The FTP admin must review the uploads before transferring them to the pub directory to make them available for download." Sounds like this is very commonly the default setting for linux FTP servers such as vsftpd or pro_ftpd. Dizzie your site admin if you rent FTP or your man pages for your own linux FTP server will give you details on how these are tweaked or set :) Logan

Thanks for the info!!

Im not sure if anyone knows how to sort this out, but im using cpanel, enabled anonymous users and they can log in to the incoming folder but when trying to upload any files there is a message saying '553 Anonymous users may not overwrite existing files'. Im using WS_FTP Pro. Any1 experienced thid before?

Hmmm I think my host doesnt allow anonymous FTP. Can I create a normal account that only allows uploads? Or perhaps I should find a PHP uploading script.

Hello Laver2k As far as the error you got, that doesnt necessarrily sound bad: overwriting of existing files would indicate that the anon account grants FULL permissions with overwriting authority to anon users. This isnt what we want in the upload dir :) Are you certain that what you attempted to upload had a case specific unique filename compared to anything already in the upload folder? If so, then there sounds like there may be a minor error. I would begin by emailing the host, explaining that the anon account is needed, and why. They are bound to respect the responsibility behind the reason. Check that you tried to upload a unique file, and if not, try a unique filename, and if that still errors, drop a quick line to the site admin :) and of course, keep us posted please ;) Logan

Ok, I guess I will try to stick with FTP as opposed to PHP uploads. I will contact the host =). Thanks.

My host says annonymous FTP wont work. Can I 'fake' an anonymous account/directory by changing read/write permissions?

Should be easy to create the directories and accounts as needed.

First create an account and directory with WRITE only permissions, and post the logon info publicly. As an example:

user:freebie
pw:upload

Step two, create a second account and directory with READ only permissions, once again posting logon info:

user:archive
pw:download

This should resolve the issue of this particular host choosing to disable the anon account feature of thier FTP server.

lemme know how it goes :)

Logan

Message edited on: 08/07/2004 16:49

I can do the this no problem. I guess ill have to trust ppl not to modify other people's files. Beats having to worry about warez lol.

With the upload directory being WRITE only it is possible that it will appear to the world as an empty dir with only thier upload present. If this is the case, then they cant access any existed files and edit in any way! Also check out for limited WRITE as opposed to FULL for this dir. Even if there turns out to be no way to lock this down it wont affect the download dir, as all items there will be pre-examined :) Logan

the permissions look fine, but im not 100% sure what is going to be visible to anyone else in this particular directory.

Id suggest logging in as a guest rather than as an admin, and put the settings thru thier paces. Try to do what you want guests to accomplish and see if the FTP experience from that perspective is user friendly. Try to do what you DONT want guests to do while logged in as guest and see how your permissions hold up. Log in as a guest, upload something, then log off, relog on as a guest and try to manipulate the last upload, then try to access forbidden areas of the server.

Basically, riot around a little in the name of science ;)

Feel free to send me a private email if you need another remote tester, as well.

Logan OOPS forgot to mention: Servers will execute thier permissions based only on username/account and the settings assigned to that account by the sysadmin. There is never a consideration by the server as to what IP addy any account is logging on from. The IP is written to the server log along with time of access and actions taken when anyone logs on, but this is just so admins can go back and research incidents on the server.

Message edited on: 08/08/2004 13:21