If you’ve had a free website at Our Locality for years, maybe you wondered how come it was free. In the good old days the overheads of running the service were smaller and the community benefits of running a free service easily outweighed the relatively small costs.
In the early years Sustaining Dunbar subsidised the service almost fully (the hosting side). We’ve calculated that this could have cost groups many hundreds of pounds over the period. Free hosting aside the full costs of having a website presence are calculated in human time. The time it takes to get the content together, commission the digital assets, do a some design etc and get the whole thing into a publishable form.
The good news is that we hope to continue to offer a free tier to any group that can demonstrate it cannot afford a full blown web presence (see below).
But for projects and groups with a budget, perhaps they have paid staff or are paying for services like printing or promotion, but which need a professional website with a domain and and greater storage space, the hosting is no longer completely free.
After eight years we are still hosting over a hundred sites, run safely and securely, and for our part at least, contribute to your GDPR compliance needs.
As of today to get the benefits of a full blown domain with ssl security built in, you’ll need to subscribe to our basic plan – but only available if you manage your own domain.
Basic £36/y
If it is storage space you need, then we’d encourage you to join our More Plan.
More is £72/y
More comes with 1Gb of storage, ample for most community projects.
If you need extra sites, then try the Plus Plan
Plus is £144/y
Three sites. Each site comes with 1Gb of space.
Need hands on help?
For £75, and multiples thereof, we can help you make small changes to your website to make it look more professional, perhaps integrate social media or a sign up form to your newsletter.
But if you are a really hard up project, you can just buy us a beer.
What is more, if you can’t even afford that and your demands are low (you don’t need a domain or much storage) you can keep your site up completely free and forever – ie for as long as we can keep the project going. Qualify for free if you:
- don’t pay anyone in your group to do anything (e.g. your accountant works pro bono)
- don’t pay for other services, like printing, adverts in the press or other promotional materials
- don’t have a bean let alone a bank account
- you get the idea
If you think all of this policy change is grossly unfair, we’ll even help you export your content to your favourite hosting provider though we’re struggling to thing who is going to provide the same level of service for free.
2 replies on “We’ve launched new payment plans”
You can enable comments on your our locality website too, but it requires a bit of management so we have tended to encourage people to keep them turned off until they’ve understood how moderation settings are best configured and that keeping comments open indefinitely is a recipe for spam.
To safeguard against creating an unintended spam magnet, the default settings require comments to be turned on at the individual article level. Once you get the hang we recommend you look at the Settings > Discussion page and relax settings very gradually. There are quite a few advantages to managing comments on your site rather than outsourcing it to a social media site, unfashionable though that may sound.
Goodness gracious, we didn’t know we could leave comments on this site!