The story behind HostWoot!
I thought this project deserved a little more than a mention on the Projects section hence this post.
So you might be asking yourself, how did HostWoot come along?
This project started for me when I took over from the previous owners, Dan and Josh. At this time I was actually running my own free ffmpeg host called TubeHosting which was going really well considering I was one of two free ffmpeg hosts out there. Originally when I took over, HostWoot only offered free cpanel hosting with a friendly community so I thought it would be a smart move to merge my old project (TubeHosting) into this one and it worked extremely well. I believe it was HostWoot who triggered more than seven other FFMpeg post to host websites to start up. I know this because the set of rules and certain pages/phrases I personally wrote up were being copied for their sites and although it was pretty annoying to see my work copied, I felt flattered. A simple Google search for the exact phrases I wrote comes back with more than seven sites. When we shutdown (27th September, 2011) we had exactly 50056 posts and 5399 threads which meant this project received more than 117.78 posts a day! (excluding all posts from the old forum) Below are some statistics and interesting pictures I thought I would share.
HostWoot was using nearly 200MB of bandwidth per day with over 130,000 page views per day. It was the most popular free ffmpeg host out there with more than 2000 websites spread across two dedicated servers. Below is the shutdown message that was posted on HostWoot:
Hi,
It has been a very long and pretty strange trip to get to where we are today and i am very upset to announce that we will be shutting down. I am pretty sure that i will not be starting HostWoot up again.
This is mainly to do with the funding and time available. When i first took over this site from the previous owners in 2007/8 it was pretty small and spending time on this site was pretty easy to do. A few requests here and there which was not too bad. Today its more 7-20 pages of posts to look though and quite a lot of requests. Get more people to help out? Well, its not that simple.
Funding. This is a pretty big issue. Probably the biggest by far. Keeping this place running smoothly costs a lot of money, there is the dedicated server and licenses to start with.
Google decided to block us out of their Adsense program which was paying for nearly everything. I tried contacting them but just got an automated reply. I then tried creating a new account to which they just banned in the following week. This would not be much of a problem but when both income sources are severed or saturated keeping a place like this up is not top on the list. The other source of income was the money i was receiving (EMA) but this has been cut thanks to the Education cuts here in the UK.
Now what? Well i would HIGHLY suggest you take a backup of your files and find another host. The server will retain all files for quite a few days before deleting them. This is me essentially giving notice to everyone before we shut down and all files are deleted. The winner of the website designing contest is wpjweb. You will get your free domain in the next few weeks and your design will be used for MaximumHost. If you are looking for hosting i would suggest you switch to MaximumHost as it is going to be extremely stable after HostWoot closes.
Any questions? Go ahead, you know the drill, just reply. If you are suspended and need a backup, you can also ask here on this thread to be unsuspended so you can take a backup.
Website Statistics 2010/2011 and interesting information:
Monthly uptime as recorded by WebHostingStuff, from 20 August 2009. Downtime in minutes, with the number of outages in brackets. Blank months were outside the monitoring period.
| Month | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 100% | 100% | |
| Feb | 100% | 100% | |
| Mar | 99.87% 59 min (3) | 99.56% 195 min (2) | |
| Apr | 99.96% 16 min (1) | 100% | |
| May | 100% | 100% | |
| Jun | 96.12% 1,679 min (1) | 96.55% 1,491 min (3) | |
| Jul | 98.31% 757 min (5) | 100% | |
| Aug | 100% | 100% | 98.44% 695 min (4) |
| Sep | 99.91% 41 min (1) | 100% | 98.37% 703 min (4) |
| Oct | 99.97% 15 min (1) | 100% | 100% |
| Nov | 100% | 100% | |
| Dec | 100% | 99.61% 174 min (2) |
If you have any questions please feel free to comment.
Comments (3)
Havoc, February 8th, 2012
Hi Umar! I just found out that HostWoot has shut down. It’s really sad to see such a good hosting service shut down. I joined HostWoot a few years ago and was there when the service first shut down and was taken over by you. I believe HostWoot deserves the rank of the best free ffmpeg hosting service. I am wondering if there is a way of starting HostWoot again. What if the funding for launching HostWoot was taken care of? Hostwoot is a great service for students and even for new professionals. Please contact me if you think that there was any way HostWoot could start again.
Umar Salim, February 13th, 2012
I believe it should still be online and still be hanging onto the best free ffmpeg hosting service title but that is just not possible. There is not just the funding to think about. I also don’t have the time to be working on HostWoot any more.
Havoc, February 13th, 2012
Contact me through email and I might be able to get some really high end servers for HostWoot by end of March if you want to start HostWoot again. Might have to limit disk usage and bandwidth, but I am sure the servers I got should be good enough with 8 cpu’s and 16 GB RAM. Also you might have to come up with some ways to generate profits from this site, but I got some ideas for it too. Email me if you are interested. I believe HostWoot has potential and it would be a shame to let HostWoot fade away.