As most of you know, Wikidot started as a "free wiki" service. For the first two years we were providing free websites for everybody who needed it without any charge. For those with greater demands and requirements we introduced Pro accounts in 2008. More sites, more storage, more features.
More than 60% of our total traffic come from free sites, vast majority of our users have free accounts. Although most of the top-active users pay for a premium account, all of them started with free ones, gradually discovering that it is worth to pay for it.
Free is important. Large part of our business depend on people getting free accounts and starting free sites. And it works pretty well for us — although it is quite expensive to keep a free version available, it definitely pays off in the long term.
The most popular free sites at Wikidot are devoted to gaming. Look at great sites like AQWWiki, Frets on Fire, Angels Online. There are dozens of great free sites used by gamers on a daily basis, and we are happy to provide resources they need.
This is where I am shocked seeing reputable and large services like Ning or Vox shutting their free services down. Deadpool at Techcrunch.com is full of failed projects that either started with a very poor business model or wanted to give away things they could not afford. Or simply did not meet the expectations of founders or investors.
This is so not our case. Even better: we are making free sites more attractive. Earlier this year we made custom domain mapping free1. Now we are making another step.
Many people complain that although 300 MB for file storage is fine, the current limit of 5 MB per file is too small to upload music, high-quality photos or even PDFs. We have decided to increase this limit to 25 MB.
If you have ideas how to make free sites even more awesome, please share!
On free sites, the placing of the ads can sometimes wreck the design. It's in the top of the main content area. What if you could choose from few different (reasonable) positions? One of them could be the side bar for example. And if you'll choose more of them, you'd get more features (storage space for example)!
Another issue that has been under discussion, is that you can't control the contents of the ads in any way. It's not fun if you have a free site that's against furs and a fur ad is the first thing you see when you enter the site.
Edit: Adsense chooses the ads by the contents of the site so you'd most likely see a fur ad on such a site!
___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
so true. the incredible power, flexibility, and generosity of wikidot's free offerings is what made me choose to start my site on wikidot in the first place. nothing else compared. i knew my project could be successful here. eventually my needs grew and i upgraded to pro when it was available, because the value is amazing for what you get.
I'm already happy with free, but yes: please do be even more awesome. How's the growth going these days?
The number of new users per day has been hovering between 1,000 & 1,100 for the last few days, which is considerably better than the sign up rate a few months back when we reached the 500,000 user mark. I think this is strong evidence that Wikidot is heading in the right direction.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
This is a good move: Wikidot's approach is so much better than the line that Ning etc are taking. As Michal has correctly pointed out, the majority of us who now have paying accounts started out with free accounts, and it is so important to atrract and develop free users as it gives them a risk-free platform to experiment to see if Wikidot does what theywant it to do, whether that is for gaming, community, a personal site or for business. If I had been forced to pay up-front without being able to experiment I would probably not have investigated Wikidot at all, and it's now 50% of my business!
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Does that mean that pro lite accounts get an increase in the file size limit as well? Please?!
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
It would appear not, since the plans page has been updated with the new value for free, and it is now the same as pro lite. There isn't really room to increase that, since pro and pro+ only allow 50MB.
It is one less reason to buy pro-lite, but admittedly, now free has adverts, there is still a pretty good impetus to do so.
So I'm sure my "a few more sites on pro-lite please" will fall on deaf ears, and that would really require upgrading all account types too.
my wish is that the plans improve proportionally. so if free gets an increased limit, so should pro lite and pro and pro+. i dont know if thats sustainable or realistic though
Yes. Personally, I would like to see 80-100 MB per file on a Pro+ account. However, 99% of the time the current 50 MB limit is enough for my needs so I'm happy for the time being.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
We are looking at technical possibilities of increasing the upload file size. Stay tuned!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
on a similar note, might you be able to lift the limit of how many files you can upload at a time… at least for pro? when you're trying to upload a big photo album or something, 50 files is actually way too low, and it's a pain to break it up into separate batches.
When the API includes the ability to upload files, I'll be able to write an application that can do that in about an hour.
You would select the files (or even entire folders/directories) to upload, and the application would upload them all one-by-one for you, giving you a progress report along the way.
In Java, for example, the OpenFileDialog class that exists in the libraries already means that the only code I need to write is to actually connect with the API and give it some file names.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
To be honest I closed all my wikidot sites when you modified free sites to have this awful footer and header. I visited here today only because… some spammer editer my placeholder site to leave links to his page. Right now you are writting in big words but only changing one small thing.
My free music on Jamendo, soundtracks-like, my photography blog
Only in Polish: http://wieza.org (RPG, fantastyka)
You don't need to show the header and footer on free sites - it can be disabled in the site manager.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
yeah, you can edit out the headder&footer, just done it on my private wiki.
Look for it on the admin pannel
Well, it was not possible then. Maybe free wikidot sites are usefull again. Thanks for the info.
My free music on Jamendo, soundtracks-like, my photography blog
Only in Polish: http://wieza.org (RPG, fantastyka)