Ways to promote HD

J

JerryM

New member
As we all know, everyone here loves HD, however, community involvement seems to have gone down considerably in the last year.

This thread is to try and come up with way to try to improve this.

I think Art had an excellent idea with the monetary award. It just hasn't seemed to help as much as it should have.

While we have daily activity here, it seems like mostly advertising.

So, how do we get the knowledge flowing again and encourage new member's to join?

One idea I've been tossing around is, providing the top 5? contributors a month of free hosting.. The problem here is finding companies willing to do this. I for one am but I can't do it alone. The other problem is, this would probably only work for the end users. Why would a company want hosting from another company?

Well, just one idea to think about and work bugs out of. What's everyone else's thoughts?
 
Offering a free hosting for a month or whatever sounds great in theory, but as you said yourself, most of the people on this forum are web hosting companies themselves, so usage would be limited. You'd also run into an open invitation for a spammer or abuser to do whatever they wanted on the hosting account with limited to no repercussion --- the very heart of why Free Hosting never works.

As a web hosting company that currently sponsors HD (we actually provide the server that this forum operates on), we'd definitely be open to an arrangement, but there's a lot of factors that would need to be discussed prior to implementing the offer.

The monetary reward system does work, but it all depends on how much someone participates and provides valuable information. The moderators do a pretty great job with keeping the spammers away, and the forum members here do an excellent job of reporting any posts that get past a moderator (or alerting them to a potential issue).

Having spent more than a decade in forums and answering questions from people, I find myself answering the same questions time and time again - to be honest, I now skip answering some questions as they've been asked a thousand times - (how do I find clients, where should I advertise, should I offer cpanel, which is better - windows or linux, etc etc). So many of these have been beat to death, but few people take a couple of minutes to run a search in the forum (or google). That said, since we are all technically competitors, many of us don't want to give up any special secrets either. There are things that each of the hosts do on a surface level which are shared to the general public and clients such as software versions, backup software, general server tips - but there are also a lot of secrets that each of us have such as how to best configure MySQL so as not to overload a server, what hacker fighting tools do you use, specific network security questions, or where we receive the most clients from.

Artashes did have a program running here for quite some time regarding the top contributors that added value, but that requires a lot of man hours reading through each post and determining quality over quantity. A person with 25 posts can easily beat someone with 70 posts if those 70 posts were of low quality "yeah I agree" type posts. As such, the monetary program worked out pretty well.

I'm interested to see how others might suggest things though.
 
Conor you would have most likely come across this when looking an smaller forums of any kind.

if a question comes up about finding a host its always the same answer "take a look at WHT or LEB" its very rare i see HD mentioned in other forums
 
Hey Jerry, and the rest of the gang! Thank you so much for starting a discussion on contests/promotions!

I am running on a tight schedule today, but I will (a) monitor this thread closely, and (b) reply shortly with my thoughts.
 
Yeah, HD is rarely mentioned. I mention it, and then www.talkfreelance.com when dealing with designers, developers and that nature - but by the same token, so many other forums that I deal with also prohibit the mentioning or recommending of any alternate forum other than their own.

Who is LEB? I don't think I recognize that name.
 
handsonhosting said:
Offering a free hosting for a month or whatever sounds great in theory, but as you said yourself, most of the people on this forum are web hosting companies themselves, so usage would be limited. You'd also run into an open invitation for a spammer or abuser to do whatever they wanted on the hosting account with limited to no repercussion --- the very heart of why Free Hosting never works.

As a web hosting company that currently sponsors HD (we actually provide the server that this forum operates on), we'd definitely be open to an arrangement, but there's a lot of factors that would need to be discussed prior to implementing the offer.

The monetary reward system does work, but it all depends on how much someone participates and provides valuable information. The moderators do a pretty great job with keeping the spammers away, and the forum members here do an excellent job of reporting any posts that get past a moderator (or alerting them to a potential issue).

Having spent more than a decade in forums and answering questions from people, I find myself answering the same questions time and time again - to be honest, I now skip answering some questions as they've been asked a thousand times - (how do I find clients, where should I advertise, should I offer cpanel, which is better - windows or linux, etc etc). So many of these have been beat to death, but few people take a couple of minutes to run a search in the forum (or google). That said, since we are all technically competitors, many of us don't want to give up any special secrets either. There are things that each of the hosts do on a surface level which are shared to the general public and clients such as software versions, backup software, general server tips - but there are also a lot of secrets that each of us have such as how to best configure MySQL so as not to overload a server, what hacker fighting tools do you use, specific network security questions, or where we receive the most clients from.

Artashes did have a program running here for quite some time regarding the top contributors that added value, but that requires a lot of man hours reading through each post and determining quality over quantity. A person with 25 posts can easily beat someone with 70 posts if those 70 posts were of low quality "yeah I agree" type posts. As such, the monetary program worked out pretty well.

I'm interested to see how others might suggest things though.
Click to expand...

You bring up some very valid points Conor.

For the free hosting. I would still recommend having the person sign up like a client but give them a coupon code for the free month. This way they are still checked for Fraud and the company would have their information in case they are spamming or running something illegal.

What I meant be the monetary program not working as well as it should have is, I thought it would have encouraged people to post more and post valuable information. While people are, it's just not as much as I personally thought it would be. Still a great idea and program though.
 
Interesting little site - as a hosting company I'd stay far far way from a VPS for $5, but as a testing box it's not a bad price for people. No way would I put a production environment with traffic on a "low end box". Even back in the late 90's the dedicated boxes that we provided to people had a minimum of 512MB memory and 1GB for anyone doing busy static sites. In todays world of databases and PHP there's no way I'd put anything on such an underpowered setup and then pass it to a client.

I'll have to have a poke through their forums - doubt I'll join as it's just not my target market, but probably worth having a look through. Thanks for the links!
 
handsonhosting said:
Interesting little site - as a hosting company I'd stay far far way from a VPS for $5, but as a testing box it's not a bad price for people. No way would I put a production environment with traffic on a "low end box". Even back in the late 90's the dedicated boxes that we provided to people had a minimum of 512MB memory and 1GB for anyone doing busy static sites. In todays world of databases and PHP there's no way I'd put anything on such an underpowered setup and then pass it to a client.

I'll have to have a poke through their forums - doubt I'll join as it's just not my target market, but probably worth having a look through. Thanks for the links!
Click to expand...

yes and some of the prices are just daft

£4.40 512MB Xen VPS in UK
512MB memory/512MB swap
40GB RAID10 storage
300GB/month data transfer @ 100mbit
4 x Dual XEON Quad Core cores
Xen/SolusVM
1 x IPv4
 
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