FreeBeeHosting
Posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 7:20 am by George Palmer
This is the latest item from my old portfolio. I’m going to start a fresh here and get some more recent stuff up. If you like what you see feel free to contact me for a quote.
FreeBeeHosting was a little out of the ordinary for me. I actually purchased the very small (20 users) free hosting company using the domain www.FreeBeeHosting.com. I just really liked the idea and the domain was a really cool play on words.
It turned out that the site itself was useless, the sign up system was unsuitable and the site as a whole needed an overhaul.
I set myself a simple spec to develop and implement a new sign up system which incorporated instant account activation and made use of a GeoIP database to prevent fraud. The site and forum templates were designed by myself to follow the bee theme. I outsourced the character art to a colleague of mine and the bees were born.
I chose to use the DirectAdmin control panel as this was little used in the free hosting scene. The sign up was then developed to make use of the DirectAdmin API. This allowed for the instant account activation in the original plan. I made use of MaxMinds GeoIP database and implemented radial search on locations to ensure perspective users were in the same vicinity as they claimed. I incorporated a 3 strike system which works by studying the sign up form for particular tags and phrases which suggest misuse of the account. If three or more terms are found the user is blacklisted and their IP blocked from sign up. This has now been extended to include location bases strikes.
Overall the site and system is clearly a success. The site currently hosts around 8,000 free accounts on several dedicated servers. There are no ads placed on users accounts and the all income is generated through advertisement schemes.
The following skills were used during this development.
- (X)HTML
- XML
- W3C
- JavaScript / Ajax
- OO PHP5
- MySQL
- PhotoShop
- Illustrator
- DirectAdmin API
- Max Minds GeoIP API
Copyright © 2009 George Palmer
i can’t singup
Any error messages? Did you contact support? Ask the question on the forum? I can’t help without any information.
Quite a jump from 20 to 8k members. I am one of them and am surprised at the great implementation of the components. Truly a great job.
Hi, courteous posts there
thank’s recompense the intriguing information
Hi, Congratulations to the site owner for this marvelous work you’ve done. It has lots of useful and interesting data.
Quite right! I like this idea, I completely with you agree.
Hi george i love the freebeehosting site just thought i would check out your amazing blog, seen a few of your past projects, very smart !
Dear George, Its really fantastic services you have done with FreeBeeHosting. I loved being there as a member. Thanks for that.
I was compared with another, but found that yours are the best from my opinion. Good luck!
its a great job you are doing to the world keep it up
Dear George, Its really fantastic services you have done with FreeBeeHosting. I loved being there as a member. Thanks for that.
I was compared with another, but found that yours are the best from my opinion. Good luck!
I wanted to register with your site, and the page said I needed a domain name, so I clicked your sponsor co.cc and paid $3 to register myself a domain name. That site was secure in setting up a domain name. Then I was going along on your page entering confidential information into the form for registration, and when I got down to the field asking for a desired password and then typing it
I saw it coming out in plain text. Then I looked on my browser screen
and saw that your page with the signup form was NOT SECURE so I did not submit it to signup for your free service of hosting a web page.
I am unhappy about all this, and of course one of your advertisers co.cc domain services made out good with $3 of mine.
I guess the moral to the story is nothing is really free, and someone
is going to make good on all this, but it won’t be me, the victim of…who knows what.
Hello Steven, I’m sorry to hear you are unhappy with our service at Free Bee Hosting. I’m not really sure why you paid $3 for a co.cc domain, these domains are free. I can also assure you the sign up for for our free hosting is secure. Am I right in assuming you are worried about the fact we do not use an SSL certificate on the free hosting sign up? If this is the case, the reason we do not use SSL is because we do not handle any sensitive information on the sign up, It’s simply not necessary to use SSL.
Your moral is something that is made very clear on Free Bee. Your hosting is free to you, but we make money by advertising on our site and offering the free domain. So what you essentially pay is your time on our site and on co.cc.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at when you say “victim”, there are no victims, this is a legit service.
Best Regards, George
i totally agree with palmer.
Why would you pay 3 dollars for a co.cc domain .
You can get the first 10 domains free and then if you donate 10 dollars to the site(co.cc) you can get an extra 100 domains.
I currently own over 500 of these domains and i ve never paid more than 10 cents per domain.