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[Alex Atkin UK]

I understand that life was better in some ways, but that is down to people’s stupidity not the fault of the web or the internet. I would have had so much better education in my early years if I had had wiktionary, Wikipedia and YouTube. I use these every day and have learned a great deal. Having zero cost access to vast amounts of information and internet delivery of books - the value in my young life would have been incredible. The cost of books and access to them was a nightmare in 1970. I bought a textbook on particle physics when I was 11 and one on nuclear physics - cost me a fortune, had to order and wait for them to arrive and couldn’t preview them, because I didn’t have access to a major library. The value of YouTube, being able to listen to random pieces of music without cost so you can just taste things, again that would have changed my life in the 1970s. Things are so much better for me than 20 years ago even, when access to educational resources were again difficult, and a lot of pig-in-a-poke buying was involved mainly because I didn’t know how to access specialised academic libraries, even though living in London. I spent hundreds of pounds on books, £150 on one book, in 1996, I recall, and these books were bought mostly unseen.

My life would not be worth living without the Internet.  I sometimes go months without leaving the house due to anxiety and/or depression, so I watch a metric ton of YouTube, TV shows and movies.

When I was a teen (at a point where I think I did have Internet access but you still paid for the calls so I had to use it sparingly) I used to sit in the local park on my own and sulk, that's rather seen differently when you're 40.  Not to mention its too painful to do so now.

[Weaver]

> My life would not be worth living without the Internet.  I sometimes go months without leaving the house due to anxiety and/or depression, so I watch a metric ton of YouTube, TV shows and movies.

I’m very sorry indeed to hear that, I have first hand experience of this so I very much understand and sympathise. I do hope you’re able to get the help you need. Unfortunately a lot of that turns out to be nowadays down to money and access, not based on need.

[Chrysalis]

Weaver your points on book is bang on, sadly though the internet is gradually turning more and more commercial.  The end game is likely a whitelisted portal of commercial services shown to the user when they login to their isp, we not there yet of course, but I think thats the end game.

I remember 10-15 years ago e.g. if I researched WW2 on the internet there was dozens of quality sites with detailed information on various battles, equipment etc.  Now days I noticed a lot of these sites either are gone, or have been changed to only show small bits of information as a highlight from a book that is for sale.  These books are typically quite expensive.  I think remember a spell where I read a few discussion forums on WW2, and some websites, and over that 1-2 hour spell I was recommended circa 30 books which had an average price of about £12-15 each, which would be an outlay of 100s of pounds.  I think books as an example should be more accessible in their pricing, they would sell much more and manufacturing costs are nowhere near the retail of cost of these books, especially the ebooks and audiobooks.  Sadly though the amount of free quality content is reducing, more and more of the internet is becoming commercially motivated, Wikipedia is a obvious standout against the crowd. 

The search engines have become a reach chore to use for educational purposes, they have basically become glorified shop fronts, if you search for something that you think even has no bearing on buying from a shop, the search engines will somehow still manage to dump store fronts on first page of the search results, and the reason for that is the algorithms now favour results that makes the search engine providers money, whether thats sponsored results or favouring SEO scoring over the accuracy of the results.  In addition you cannot even specifically search for discussions or blogs anymore on google (without a browser extension), google long removed that feature as they want people to find commercial sites not free to use forums.

On top of this browser developers are adding new features all the time that incentivise money making from websites, e.g. that new horrible feature where you get a "delayed" popup, which either waits about 5-10 seconds or even worse can detect mouse movement, and as soon as you move the mouse a pop takes focus.  Both these tend to circumvent any popup blockers, the refusal from google to add to chrome to block autoplay videos, as well as site developers to not only have autoplay videos where the behaviour cannot be tuned, also autoplay follow up videos as well, purely for commercial gains.

I do wonder how housebound people, those with anxiety etc. got by before the internet was a thing, because as has been said, its a life changer for those people.

[PhilipD]

Hi

Sadly though the amount of free quality content is reducing

Because it is free and the people creating it need to earn a living perhaps at some point?  Why should you get all that content that people have taken their own time to create for free?  If you place value in it, then support them and pay for it, or create some content rather than just consume it?

Regards

Phil

[sevenlayermuddle]

A problem I am having more and more these days is...

...Prior to the web, if I wanted to research historical knowledge of some subject, I’d have gone to any decent public library.   I’d have trawled through old books and old papers and magazines, and found what I wanted.

Thanks to the web, the libraries have pretty much all gone.   On technical matters it can be very hard to dig up knowledge that existed before about 1990, unless somebody has bothered to transpose the material to electronic format and put it publicly online and make it searchable.  And that only tends to happen if it is regarded as important, or trendy, or profitable.

[Weaver]

It’s a life changer for me, being effectively semi bed-bound. I’m constantly diving into

• http://en.wiktionary.org,
• http://dwelly.info,
• SMO stor-dàta,
• http://dil.ie and
• the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru app for iOS

I used to work with a blind programmer who used a ‘screen reader’ which had vibrating metal pin dot matrix on his finger connected to an optical sensor which scanned the screen of a computer and turned the visible pattern of pixels (black and white ones!) into a pattern or still or vibrating pins in the matrix. I had a go with this, fascinating. The nightmare for blind users in the 1980s; at least now some o/s’s have strong support for blind users with speech synths and most importantly app user interfaces that connect to speech synths and apps which expose semantics of content to accessibility software subsystems.

I’m not as pessimistic about the future of the internet and the web. The reason is that ISPs aren’t really in control of the web or internet even if they like to think they are. Users can always vote with their feet, and if they want straight service and ‘mere-conduit’ ISP behaviour then they can get it; it just might mean voting with their feet. There are still decent ISPs out there. If ISPs think they’re in control they should remember someone called ‘AOL’ (who?) who tried to portal-ise their crippled version of the internet. But they became a laughing stock, deeply uncool and died horribly. Why should users settle for restricted subsets of the full thing? Tampering with the internet is a very risky game for an ISP here (US may be different) as remember the BT PHORM scandal and the backlash. And if memory serves a resulting uncomfortable AGM for the ‘don’t be evil’ BT.

[Chrysalis]

Hi

Because it is free and the people creating it need to earn a living perhaps at some point?  Why should you get all that content that people have taken their own time to create for free?  If you place value in it, then support them and pay for it, or create some content rather than just consume it?

Regards

Phil

I guess we have different mindsets, I do many things for free, yes I need to eat and survive, but that doesnt mean I need to charge for everything I do and on top of that charge the maximum i could get away with, the reward for doing such things, is giving others knowledge, and enjoyment when they otherwise wouldnt have it.  These ebooks e.g. could probably be sold for 20p-£1 each, they would likely make just as much income, but this would be spread over much more sales.

If i add a game guide to gamefaqs, I dont expect gamefaqs to pay me for my content, I dont expect payment from kitz everytime  make a post on this forum, you get my point I hope, I am ok with some commercial services on the internet, but I feel the amount of free content is significantly going down,. and there is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing that out.

The inventor of the internet designed it for this purpose also.

For me the best of both worlds is where something is free, but optional payment can be made, an example of that is twitch gaming.  Commercialised which does cause problems with it, but at least the content that is there is accessible to the poor.  It is entirely possible to make a living of such a model, if that is your only motivation to publish on the internet.

I’m not as pessimistic about the future of the internet and the web. The reason is that ISPs aren’t really in control of the web or internet even if they like to think they are. Users can always vote with their feet, and if they want straight service and ‘mere-conduit’ ISP behaviour then they can get it; it just might mean voting with their feet. There are still decent ISPs out there. If ISPs think they’re in control they should remember someone called ‘AOL’ (who?) who tried to portal-ise their crippled version of the internet. But they became a laughing stock, deeply uncool and died horribly. Why should users settle for restricted subsets of the full thing? Tampering with the internet is a very risky game for an ISP here (US may be different) as remember the BT PHORM scandal and the backlash. And if memory serves a resulting uncomfortable AGM for the ‘don’t be evil’ BT.

Thats a point i didnt consider, it is in the CP's best interest's for the internet to remain as open as it is now, because otherwise potentially they have less subscribers.  So that is a commercial interest in keeping the internet as open as it is, whilst I think portals are the end game, they are likely at the very least a decade away.  You are also correct portal's were used in the very early days of the internet, I do remember them.

[Weaver]

DuckduckGo anyone?

[Alex Atkin UK]

Are people forgetting the hosting costs?  Its not just about the cost of creating the content, its keeping it online, especially if your visitors are entitled assholes so you lose motivation for providing it at your own cost.

Its also why I do not use Adblock, I will block something on the router only if its particularly obnoxious, which is usually from pron sites. 

[Chrysalis]

now days hosting costs for hobbyists sites are practically zilch, even for busier sites its nowhere near what it used to be.

I think I provide hosting for 30+ people at no cost, as my own costs are so low, it simply isnt worth my time trying to charge for it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

now days hosting costs for hobbyists sites are practically zilch, even for busier sites its nowhere near what it used to be.

I think I provide hosting for 30+ people at no cost, as my own costs are so low, it simply isnt worth my time trying to charge for it.

What are you using, because VPS seem to get quite pricey once you start adding more storage.

I was with BHost but the people who took them over charge WAY more than they did, so I have no upgrade path without losing my legacy pricing.

To me the future of hosting has always been that everyone has fat pipes at home.  With the help of sites like Cloudflare caching popular content, it could make hosting absolutely free, apart from domain registration.

Only last week I got an e-mail from a fansite host that they will be dropping hosting any sites without a lot of traffic, because Google Ads no longer supports domains with low traffic.  Though granted, they pay for the domains AND the hosting so it makes sense that if the ads don't cover the domain cost, its not worth it for them.

[Chrysalis]

Storage is the most costly element of hosting now days, since bandwidth is practically zero cost. Shared computing power brings down the cost of ram/cpu resources.

But VPS space is going to be plenty for a typical website, its probably only an issue if either you have a huge database, or its a media heavy site.

There is one person I know who took 100s in donations every month, to cover hosting costs, on top of that he had adverts, the thing is, his hosting costs were about a fiver a month, I know because I was his host.  So I tend to take it with a pinch of salt when people go on about hosting costs, now of course if you pay for "managed" hosting, its a different kettle of fish, since there is a premium to be paid for that type of service.

For my own hosting I have the following.

4 dedicated servers, 3 of them which are been utilised as virtual machine hosts.  Since thats a much more efficient to utilise hardware.
2 VPS, these dont really host anything, I use them for DNS services and VPN end points.

VPS are a very useful platform these days, not just for the cost but also for the fact you can usually upgrade resources without any significant downtime or having to move data around.

Cloudflare also can significantly decrease costs, as only uncached requests would make it to your server, plus they will absorb DDOS for you.

There is expensive providers out there, but its like on the domain renewal discussion, I feel they get customers paying them simply for them been "known" and not prepared to shop around.  A lot of people also likely pay for "managed" services without realising unmanaged its not that difficult to do.  Or even pay for a sysadmin that would typically cost a fraction of managed hosting fees.

Take Leaseweb as an example, you can get cheap hosting from them, but of course be prepared for no included remote hands, and long support times, but for most people neither of these are not particularly important.  For dedicated hardware check places like soyoustart, hetzner auction servers, kimsufi.

Hosting from home I have never been a fan off, the way I have always seen it, is that since hosting costs are so cheap, it feels like you saving pennies with too many downsides, a datacentre gives you multi homed redundant bandwidth and power.  Also assuming the server is rented not colo'd they will also deal with hardware failures as well. 

Also that fansite you mentioned if they are paying for the domains it perhaps does make some sense since its very likely that costs them significantly more than the actual hosting.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Also that fansite you mentioned if they are paying for the domains it perhaps does make some sense since its very likely that costs them significantly more than the actual hosting.

Yeah its a bit of crazy business model they chose as they bought up a load of domains in the hope people will make sites for them.

Also every account uses cPanel, which could be a factor if they have run over the maximum accounts limit and are paying for unused accounts.

But that's the kicker with fan sites, if you dont snap up domains quickly as soon as it looks like someone might become popular, hoarders pick them up expecting a big pay day.

[Chrysalis]

cpanel did change their pricing model which has effectively upped the cost of shared hosting using that platform, but of course there is other platforms

[Alex Atkin UK]

Oh they are charging now and their packages page is a whole load of facepalm. https://fansitehost.com/web-hosting/

25% CPU Power

Up To 5 Users

256 MB of SSD4 Memory

512 KB/s I/O Speed

I have no idea what they mean by CPU power, clearly they mean DDR4 Memory and I/O speed I assume is what the site speed is throttled to.  What an utterly bonkers package.

Also, maybe someone should split this thread off into its own as we've rather derailed the topic.