Welcome to www.TheGing.com! In the future www.TheGing.com will be a network of many nuke sites, all run from the same GingNuke installation. We intend to offer this service free to the public. However there are some issues that need to be resolved first. Probably most importantly is the issue of funding, whilst www.TheGing.com/GingNuke has been designed to host multiple sites with the minimum of space usage (We estimate that an average site would probably take up around 1.5mb additional disk space.), the disk space we have could still be used up if demand for the service is great enough. Bandwidth may also be an issue. In a nutshell we intend to expand, and obtain more disk space and more bandwidth, ideally we would like out own server, but this is far too expensive for us currently. In order to expand we need money, and so need to devise a way/ways of obtaining revenue.

Current Ideas for Revenue?
#1 Advertisements: We could advertise on the free sites. I realise that this is an unpopular option, but the service must be supported somehow. The Ads could be in the form of banners and/or text links.

#2 Member Donations: We could rely on donations from our members, - the service would still be free as donations would be optional. I'm particularly sceptical of this method, as I don't believe enough people would donate.

#3 Paid Sites: We could essentially go into business, and offer an advanced service with no advertising and more features for those willing to pay a reasonable fee each year (around £5 per year), this would be far cheaper than other nuke hosts but lacking in the freedom to install your own modules etc... (you can still request that new modules be installed). I like this method, but it would probably only be successful in conjunction with method #1 Advertising. Please note that this method might not be possible.

#4 Sell GingNuke Hosting: We could sell hosting with GingNuke (or other CMS) pre-installed; this would allow particularly successful sites to obtain more bandwidth and disk space and essentially break-off from www.TheGing.com. The hosting accounts would come with CGI, PHP and a MySQL database (PHP and MySQL are required by GingNuke). The price of this service would vary according to the type of account, but should generally be far cheaper than most other nuke hosts (£20 per year or less for the basic account). I also like this method, but I doubt it will be possible until we are a bit bigger.

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated, as well as your views on the ideas outlined above. You can vote in the poll and post in the forum (when I've set it up) to do this.

Notice
This service is not ready yet, however we will soon be looking for beta-testers.

Update [25/11/03]
Ok making some major changes to GingNuke, looks like it'll be pretty much a complete rewrite which will be good. But it'll push the project back a while. On the upside I've set up a good server for alpha & beta testing. I'll give out more info as the project progresses.

In the mean time you can help us out by linking to us if you have a site, by putting a link in you signatures on message boards. And by submitting our link to hosting/Nuke related sites, we really need to boast our link popularity so that we can get more traffic coming in and I can get some idea of the features people are looking for in the system.






PS: The Physics department is keeping us very busy so that's slowing down work! :-(