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Charging Professionals a Professional Fee

Members of the ISP-Webhosting list complain that some people have found a way to put professional websites in their free webspace, avoiding the fees associated with business hosting.

[March 31, 2003]

On the ISP-Webhosting list in February, RM asked:

Is there a way to block URL redirects? Example: Customer has webspace at http://www.myisp.com/~user and purchases a URL redirect for http://www.userbusiness.com/ to point to http://www.myisp.com/~user.

Is there a simple way to block this with the apache config?

[TE replied] "I'm curious. Why would you want to block this?"

[ML explained] "If you sell this as personal webspace you can tell the customer to either upgrade his account to a hosting account or you will shut off his "personal" Web pages."

[WS said] "We are in the same situation in the UK. Customers move and then expect us to allow them to route back by A record from another ISP to their site without paying.

Also, becuase Nominet have now removed the tag change with argument, i.e., a customer can refuse to pay us for hosting then move the tag without us being contacted, there is cause to block inbound links, which we have. On Windows 2000, its easy, just remove the header name from IIS, therefore an external record change is of no use. If the new ISP makes a jump page with html, simple, just block the originating IP in the firewall."

[GK chortled] "Don't block him...bill him!"

[JM asked] "Do you mean that you don't permit customers to use their "personal" Web page for commercial purposes? Never heard of that one. What if the dialup account itself is held by a business? Most any business that does that probably doesn't get 20 page views a week."

[ML replied] "Our dialup is one price and our dialup for small business, which includes a free domain registration, is another price. Small business customers are also going to be using more of your resources—support, bandwidth, etc.—than a residential customer, so they should pay a little more. I also believe, and I try to sell this concept to my customers, that no matter how small they are, they should have their own domain name. It just looks more professional than www.someisp.com/users/joesaccountingservices/"

[AS complained] "In our experience "personal" Web pages are used for a variety of reasonssuch as:

a) too cheap to get a real domain name (and probably too cheap to pay the regular hosting bills too)
b) does not care if it is not a domain name
c) one of the "something for nothing" crowd, the "I want it and I want it now and I want it free" crowd, who feel that a "personal Web page" should be free for some reason, and a "business Web page" should not be free for the same reason.
d) wants to run a porno site
e) wants to run a warez site
f) needs to "hide behind someone else's domain name" e.g. a hacker, or some other shady character

We have seen all of the above situations and have had to deal with the mess that is left behind such as finding out that your good domain name is in all the search engines as a porno site (type in your domain name in google or yahoo and all these porno links come up! betcha your prospective customers will love that!). In the end we eliminated 'personal Web page' accounts altogether, all three of them."

[JM added] "The redirect (or hidden frame) from a registered domain is a very inexpensive way of having a professional looking Web presence. I know a lot of small (one or two person) businesses doing this. IMO, the ones that don't, and pay hundreds of dollars per year for a two-page site, probably just don't realize that it's possible. Many (most?) registrars these days will redirect a home page to another url and forward e-mail to your dialup mailbox for a nominal fee.

It's essentially free hosting and few, if any visitors to the website will ever notice.

I've got a very good friend doing this. His registrar redirects his domain name to his attbi.com home page. He's got a very professional looking 10 or 12 page website there. It's very fast, always up, and nearly free. I'd be very hard pressed to sell him webhosting at even a dirt-cheap $9.95 per month. I know, I've tried."

—End