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Salivating for the days of the virtual buffet: when it comes to `Net giveaways these days, free is definitely a four-letter word - Opinions

Whatever happened to the free lunch? There was a time on the Internet when everyone wanted your business so badly, and there was a whole lot of "everyone" competing for your business that you could get all kind of products and services for nothing, or damned close to it.

I'm not talking about free Web hosting on Geocities or any of those other virtual trailer parks. They're fine if you have a metre-long mullet and want to put up a site devoted to the fact the U.S. government is covering up research proving the existence of angels, or a shrine to Lance Storm (the Calgary-based wrestler, not the porn star). The only companies willing to put up with a geocities.com address, of course, are the ones that sell NASCAR t-shirts and "Honk if You Love Jesus" bumper stickers.

What I mean are those outfits that offer services real companies and organizations can use without being painfully self-conscious about their brand image. There was a flood of such services for a while--places on the Web that offer professional-type services for next to nothing. None are free, exactly; Doteasy.com, for example, charges US$35 to "transfer" your domain name so you can actually use its free service.

A better example is my Web-hosting service based in Walla Walla, Wash. I get a gigabyte of space, PHP, CGI, MySQL and all the works, including the ability to host unlimited domain names, for less than $10 per month. It's like an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet for the virtual set.

The free-lunch revenue model is really just another version of the open-source loss leader. If you give--or seem to give--away your main product, you can build huge volumes and make wads of cash on small fees.

In the best of all possible worlds, it works like a charm. Unfortunately, we don't live in the Pangloss economy, and only a few free lunch sellers ever manage to make a living at it.

And let's be honest, this is the kind of thing that built the Internet to begin with. Think about it: most of us got online in the first place to be able to send free e-mail. We stayed for the free MP3s and got our companies online for the free marketing. There was that big buzz a few years back about free VoIP long-distance telephony. We'll put up with annoying ads in software to avoid paying for it. More small business sites are probably hosted on free services than on their own servers.

Face it, we all love free, and free is what we love about the Internet. But I can't shake the feeling the free lunch, in all its permutations, is finally over.

The first inkling I had was when Ottawa-based Ramius Corp. announced last summer it was going to start charging for its CommunityZero do-it-yourself bulletin board service. I had a small forum set up for a cycling club at the time and, rather than actually pay for something, I moved my whole operation over to my own Web space provided by that outfit in Walla Walla.

Nothing lasts forever, and I have just been informed by my friends in Washington that my service is now going to cost around $50 per month. Wherever I go, it seems, someone actually expects me to pay for this stuff.

Matthew Friedman is a Montreal-based freelance journalist. mwf@total.net