#1 (permalink)

Hey there.
My name is Dan. I'm a sociology student from the United Kingdom. I'm also a web-developer and writer.

I'm turning to Webmaster-Talk with a request for hosting. My research team and I are hoping to set up a huge online sociological experiment - the first of it's kind, in fact. The idea is that we construct a social networking site, much like Myspace or Facebook, and study the communication that goes on around the site. We want to see how different people communicate, look for patterns and trends of communication between different groups of people and ultimately write up a report based on what we've found. Why? Partly because we're curious and partly because we need the report to get out qualification in Sociology.

As penniless students without a research budget (the project is only supposed to be small, but we figured if we've got to do an experiment, we may as well make it big and interesting), we don't have a lot to offer in return for hosting services. We'd gladly advertise your products, or display your Adsense adverts or give you some form of recognition if that's what you want. Depending on how well the project goes down, we have a second phase in mind which should generate a fair bit of revenue which anybody willing to donate hosting would be welcome to a share of.

Our needs aren't over the top. We only need some space, a fair bandwidth limit (we're not anticipating much activity, but that's probably what Tom thought when he first devised Myspace and now look at it), PHP, a MySQL database and a subdomain (although we're looking into getting our own domain, funds allowing). As a side note, because this project will be lasting for at least six months (ideally a year), we really need a host that can guarantee that they'll still be around in a year's time.

If we've spiked some interest, we'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line (dan-c@goowy.com) if you or somebody you know might be willing to help.

Thanks in advance.