O_O That's more than I charge my small business clients for annual site hosting, if you take all the options!
And, yeah, all those free options are standard Wordpress free options. Including the anti-spam plugin, because WP software is one of the biggest spam targets around. This looks very much like a bog-standard multi-user Wordpress installation with a few of the names changed and maybe a fic-optimized theme. Or maybe not. The pages "feature" isn't even a feature as I would call one--it's a built-in part of the WP taxonomy structure.
Altogether, and speaking as a website designer, that part looks awfully like a basic site-hosting scam, especially since, for the same amount of money and approximately five more button-pushing steps, any fan could have her very own account and her very own Wordpress installation. I doubt she's paying enterprise rates herself for the parent hosting account, which would make that "covering costs" bit complete untruth; a personal hosting account with unlimited subdomains and allegedly unlimited storage and bandwidth costs less than a hundred dollars a year. (That kind of account actually gets its bandwidth strangled regularly, but most small archives have low enough traffic not to particularly notice.) An add-on domain, which is what the "your very own domain name" would be, is about ten. If there's any ad revenue coming in, it's pure gravy and quite likely less money than forty bucks a year, so it's a win-win for her pocketbook.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2011-10-03 04:37 pm (UTC)And, yeah, all those free options are standard Wordpress free options. Including the anti-spam plugin, because WP software is one of the biggest spam targets around. This looks very much like a bog-standard multi-user Wordpress installation with a few of the names changed and maybe a fic-optimized theme. Or maybe not. The pages "feature" isn't even a feature as I would call one--it's a built-in part of the WP taxonomy structure.
Altogether, and speaking as a website designer, that part looks awfully like a basic site-hosting scam, especially since, for the same amount of money and approximately five more button-pushing steps, any fan could have her very own account and her very own Wordpress installation. I doubt she's paying enterprise rates herself for the parent hosting account, which would make that "covering costs" bit complete untruth; a personal hosting account with unlimited subdomains and allegedly unlimited storage and bandwidth costs less than a hundred dollars a year. (That kind of account actually gets its bandwidth strangled regularly, but most small archives have low enough traffic not to particularly notice.) An add-on domain, which is what the "your very own domain name" would be, is about ten. If there's any ad revenue coming in, it's pure gravy and quite likely less money than forty bucks a year, so it's a win-win for her pocketbook.