Oct 24th Update: Contest suspended for the time being because of a lack of participation. We might bring it back in November. I'll keep everyone posted.

We have decided to hold several contests to celebrate the spin-off of the forum and to get more members involved with posting on here.

CONTEST #1: EARN PRIZES FROM POSTING

Every month the member that has made the most posts on the forum (for that month) will be awarded 3 months of PAID cPanel hosting on the T35 Hosting personal plan (A $15 value). Members who already have a personal paid hosting account with us qualify for a free upgrade to a business plan (A $30 value) for those same 3 months.

CONTEST #2: WIN PRIZES FROM REFERRING OTHERS

Same deal as before, but this time you get 3 months of hosting (or an upgrade to the business plan) for referring other members. The members you refer need to be active (meaning made more then 5 posts). For this contest you have to contact us and tell us the members you have referred to be entered. We reserve the right to contact any of the members to verify if you had referred them.



CONTEST #1 WINNERS

Month October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 Febuary 08

Winner Name

Winner Site

Dates of 3mo of Hosting November 1st – February 1st December 1st –  March 1st January 1st  - April 1st Febuary 1st – May 1st March 1st – June 1st

CONTEST #2 WINNERS

Month October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 Febuary 08

Winner Name

Winner Site

Dates of 3mo of Hosting November 1st – February 1st December 1st –  March 1st January 1st  - April 1st Febuary 1st – May 1st March 1st – June 1st

The Rules:
1.   We will ultimately decide the winners. We reserve the right to not count certain posts that are too short, inappropriate, etc… Only actual useful posts will be counted.
2.   This rule is just basically for the first month but you can’t win teh first contest with less than 30 posts. This insures that this contest doesn’t get abused during the first month while the site is not yet very busy.
3.   You can’t win more then once in a 12-month period. So if you win for October 2007, the next time you can win is October 2008.
4.   Although we plan to hold this contest for at least a year, we reserve the right to stop it at any time.
5.   The winner’s site and use of the hosting space must comply with the paid hosting terms of service (TOS).

Let's hope so.. This will also be coinciding with several advertising campaigns we will be running to promote the forum. We also added a note about this contest on our main site and in the welcome emails sent out to over 400 new free hosting customers every day. 

Any other ideas to make this forum popular again are always welcome!

I hope the prizes are getting safe mode off and php restrictions removed!

So, suggestions.
For the winner who is using free hostings, there are 2 choices of prizes. One is what i said above and the other is getting paid hosting if the winner owns a domain name.
And for the winner who is using Personal plan, he/she gets upgraded to Business plan like what you said.

Just to make it better

Well 3mo of hosting is a reasonable amount.. after that i guess you can either move  to another host, or if you really enjoyed the service you can start paying the $5/mo? I'm going to consider doing it for 6mo or even 12mo once this thing gets going. I just don't want to promise those kind of things and then have very few people participate anyway... thanks for the feedback though!

And with winning more then once in 12mo... i just don't want one person spamming the boards every month and winning all the prizes I want it to be at least a little fair!

You mean offer a winner an entire dedicated server? That's kind of pricey. That would mean buying a server ($3,000 min) and pay for the bandwidth/software/etc ($100/mo min).

Or do you mean put all the winners on one dedicated server? There is really no way to do with the way the free host server works. We have only one central web processing server, a backend server, and a huge storage array that both of those are hooked into. It's not as easy as "adding a server". Having that server interact with the backend storage array would be very difficult. Thanks for the feedback though!

I'm already have a cPanel 

Woohoo! This should be very interesting.