Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. I work with Expert Labs, helped build Kickstarter, founded Upcoming, made an album, and other stuff too.

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Gift Upgrades

Posted Feb 21, 2003

I followed a link from Boing Boing this morning to this Tripod-hosted Disney website, but was instead prompted with an error: "The Tripod page you are trying to reach has exceeded its hourly bandwidth limit. The site will be available again in 1 hour!"

The site's owner can then pay Tripod for bandwidth upgrades. But why can't the end user volunteer to pay the upgrade fees, so they can get to the information they want? Similarly, readers of Blogspot-hosted weblogs can't volunteer to "gift upgrade" their favorite websites to Blogspot Plus accounts; only the site's owner can upgrade.

Is there a good reason for limiting their revenue like this? Is there some sort of privacy issue I'm not aware of? It seems like a huge oversight.

5 Comments (Add Yours)

Feb 23, 2003
7:50 PM

mike wrote:

Hmm.. that is odd, I know you used to be able to pay for BlogSpot accounts for others, because I did it once. In fact, if you click on the "get rid of this ad" below the banner on a non-paid blog, it takes you to http://www.blogspot.com/ad_free.html, which then drops you through to the page you linked in your post. I wonder why they'd change that...

Feb 24, 2003
6:21 AM

jamie wrote:

the cheapest tripod plan is $4.95/mo. + a $10 set up fee. i don't know many visitors who'd want to pay that for somebody else's site. the idea of microcharges to allow the viewing of a bandwidth-exceeded member site is an interesting one, tho. the feasibility & scalability might be a challenge.

Mar 27, 2003
11:42 PM

Howard Hansen wrote:

What a great idea. But I don't want to pay the whole bill. Let me pay a dime to see the site and credit that to upgrade the bandwidth.

Jun 6, 2003
1:49 PM

Bera wrote:

stupied idea, if this gets around you wil have to pay for every page you ever want to visit, you wil pay a fortune if you are looking for someting and you dont even know if the info you want is on that page ore site. can you get a refunt if youre not completely satisfied?

if you expect lots of visitors on youre site, get an professionel hosting plan so you can put up your own banners - avs-system - members section.

if its just a hobby and you dont want to invest, the visitor wil go somewhere else to (in most cases) find even better information than on those "free" site's and blogs

Sep 23, 2003
4:05 AM

مقابل wrote:

people might not want to be obliged to strangers

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Gift Upgrades

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