Teenager launches country’s first ‘free’ web-hosting service

He has partnered with one of America’s biggest web-hosting companies.

KARACHI:

In a thriving culture of web-based startups whereby young professionals with expertise in information technology seems to be focusing on quick earnings, a 17-year-old from Rawalpindi has launched what appears to be the country’s first ‘free’ web-hosting service.

“I see that everyone these days has an email address but [wonder] why not a website?” the young CEO of base.pk Hassan bin Fahim told The Express Tribune. “In Pakistan, the biggest hurdle [to creating a personal website] is the cost involved,” he added. That’s when the young entrepreneur first came up with the idea of launching base.pk.

Launched in June this year, base.pk is a Rawalpindi-based startup that offers free web-hosting services to Pakistanis who want to create and host their personal or business websites on some platform. “It is Pakistan’s first free web-hosting service,” he claims.



“The purpose behind base.pk is to let everyone in Pakistan create an online presence for themselves and their business without worrying about the costs involved,” the teenager said.

Only three months into the launch, according to Hassan, 573 people have built their own websites using the platform. “September served a total of 110,636 hits from our servers and this month, we’ve already hosted 87,034 hits,” he said.

For an A-level student, who has achieved all of this without any marketing, this progress seems to be very significant, thanks to a free package, which Hassan claims is better than those offered by paid web-hosting services.



Base.pk offers 10 gigabytes (GB) of storage, which means one can store 100,000 text-based web pages or 30,000 multimedia-rich web pages, Hassan said. For this storage capacity, one can store up to 2,500 songs or 50 hours of video footage on their web server, he said.

The website also offers 100 GB of bandwidth – the amount of data hosted on one’s server that can be accessed by the end user in a month. Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transfer allowed per website per month on base.pk or any other web host.

Explaining, Hassan said 100 GB [of bandwidth] translates into a single text-based web page being accessed a million times until the limit is reached.

In other words, he said this means 25,000 people playing a song until the given bandwidth limit is reached – by contrast 90% of the websites, according to statistics, do not consume more than 3 GB of bandwidth.

In order to launch this project, all Hassan did was that he partnered with iFastNet – one of America’s biggest web-hosting companies – and submitted his website to Google and other search engines.

While base.pk is Hassan’s brainchild, iFastNet is responsible for providing him access to its dedicated servers located in [iFastNet] data centres. “We utilise their servers to host our websites. In return if anyone [base.pk client] wishes to purchase a [.com] domain name or advanced features, he purchases it from iFastNet,” he said while explaining the business model.

“Money is not my motivation,” he said, responding to a question about how he earns from the venture.

Unlike many young entrepreneurs who have earned quick money by monetising their ideas, Hassan has a different motivation. He wants to land admission to one of the world’s top-class graduate schools. He wants to do double major in business administration and computer science.

“The only personal benefit I aim to achieve from the website is to add a credential to my profile when I apply this year to universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University,” Hassan said.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2013.

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