October 2, 2004
gapingblog.com
"Gapingblog.com- an offshoot of Hugh MacLeod's gapingvoid and his Scottish webmaster, Jonathan Alstead- is a blog hosting service for hardcore, professional and corporate bloggers who are damn serious about the medium. No messing around."
I've gone into the blog hosting business. Sort of.
Johnno's been building and hosting gapingvoid since its inception in 2001. He's cheap, realiable, good natured and honest. His elder bother is one of my oldest and dearest friends. I trust both of them utterly.
John does all the hosting, technical, design and whatnot. My part is to help advise the client with what I know about blogging and communication strategy (which is a lot).
Clients of gapingblog.com will be able to consult me via e-mail on blog design, marketing and strategy (within reason, of course, please don't stalk me).
I am getting no money for this. Just helping out an old friend. John's a terrrific guy who's done an incredible job helping me. We talked about joining forces for years, now we have.
A fully operational, well-designed blog starts at about £120 ($200 US), plus hosting charges, which are about per £15 ($25 US) per month. Obviously if you design and code your own blog it's a lot cheaper.
I personally have had to pay more than this, to cover my bandwidth charges (lots of visitors plus lots of drawings to download equals one very thirsty website).
Last month was about 5,000 visitors a day. Extra bandwidth charge was about $30. Most blogs don't go through one tenth as much bandwidth, so it shouldn't be an issue.
We will be designing using primarily Movable Type software, though we may branch out in other packages should clients demand it. Feel free to tell us if you have another preference and we'll take care of it. I happen to be very partial to Movable Type, I also happen to know and like a lot of people who work for them.
Also included in the package will be "Spike Insurance" i.e. if somebody like Boing Boing or Doc Searls links to you and your bandwidth usage suddenly goes through the roof for a couple of days, you won't be charged extra.
I hearby stake everything I have on this: Johnno's an excellent fellow with an excellent service, and I want to be part of it. When it comes time for you to build a blog, I hope you will consider us.
Sure, there are going to be one or two details needed ironing out in the next week or so. But this is basically it, in a nutshell.
Any questions feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail at hugh at gapingvoid etc.
Is this a good business idea or not? I have no idea. I just know that between Johnno and me, we can help a lot of people enter this brave new world a lot faster and better than they would without us.
To reach Johnno visit his website, Launchsite or phone him:
UK: 0131 555 0629
Abroad: +44 131 555 0629
Thank you.
PS: Yeah, we know. The Launchsite website sucks. Johnno's always been too busy with other sites to work on it properly. We've had that conversation SO MANY TIMES. Aaaargh.
PPS: I have no intention (yet) of building a gapingblog.com website. After the weekend typing "gapingblog.com" into your browser will take you to this page. We'll see what happens.
Posted by hugh macleod at October 2, 2004 2:29 PM | TrackBack