For use: February 2000

Future Shoes: "The Boat Is Full"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Think it's easy making money running an ISP or web hosting operation?

Oh, maybe in the early days, when Internet growth was a runaway freight train. An idiot could make a dollar in that kind of environment. Worst thing could happen, you were incompetent and a bigger operation would buy you up.

But now we've eased into another phase. Growth is still strong, but it's not idiot-proof strong.

This past month I got e-mail from both my ISP and my web-hosting operation. (I have two mirroring websites, one a nearly abandoned "personal" site I started seven years ago, and the other a commercial site, about three years old.)  On each site I have about 5,000 files up for people to read, and I have each page marked so I can check each week to see who's reading what. I have books, business articles, interviews with various gurus, humorous essays, even some fiction and poetry. The latest stuff, and the most practical stuff, gets the most hits -- but I do enjoy the fact that some people hang around for days at a time, mining my life's work.

These two e-mails said the same thing: I had exceeded my allotted disk space and needed to sharply reduce my number of kilobytes, or send them a lot more money.

The maximum allowed size for my commercial site is 30 megabytes. But mine is 64 megabytes large. "Please compress or delete files, or discuss expanding your disk allotment with our sales staff," that note concluded.

The maximum allowed size for my personal site is 5 megabytes. At 64 megabytes, I was an unwelcome, nonpaying guest. "For each additional 10 MB of space there is a $ 5.00 charge. Either pay the additional $45 per month or reduce disk space usage to 5 MB."

First, I must tell you that these e-mails made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and salute. I found it profoundly threatening that I might have to cut my sites by 80%. All they are is my writing, and I enjoy having my whole life's output hanging up there like candy canes on a tree. Take down 80% of the candy canes, my babies? That's like Sophie's choice, cubed.

The logical thing to do is discontinue my personal site. It's clunky, and the URL is unrepeatable: www.skypoint.com/~mfinley. I can never explain to people what the tilde (~) is. But I get 1,000 hits a day to that site, mostly because it is listed with a dozen search engines as being a treasure trove about futurism. You might think it’s easy convincing search engines to redirect to a new domain (the sleeker, suppler mfinley.com) but these supermodern utilities are helplessly wedded to the past.

Pulling the plug on my first site will like moving out of the house my kids were born in. Tough choice.

Meantime, I am struck by one thing -- that for years neither of these companies, my ISP or my web host, cared if I was over-quota or not. Business was good, and they made money on growth.

But now it's slowing, and competition is keener, and margins are thin as onion skin. So what to do? Start policing their disk space charges. In the broadband world of the Internet, where space is infinite and storage is cheap, it's like charging for oxygen.

I gotta start deleting.