Efil, I've read this post again and again. It is very thought-provoking indeed.
The addiction of web hosting can be considered as a sub-category of Internet addiction, along with MMORPG, online gambling and online chat addictions, which all involve annonymous interactions with other people. Even though web hosting is more dealing with technical practices, it has now evolved into something social, something with addicting factors similar to other Internet addictions that I just mentioned (MMORPG, chat etc). Such "social" aspect being raised in web hosting is notable in this freewebspace.net community.
I don't have the "hostlord" approach as I'm lazy enough to notice that managing a hosting service requires a great deal of concentration that pays nothing back at the end. However I'm a free web space addict who constantly browse for free hosting services like shopping. It makes me feel good and funny inside to own many awesome hosting accounts, like how some people own many e-mail addresses just for the sake of it.
I've seen many free hosting communities with large variety of users: polite, task-oriented, social, abusive, quiet, inactive, rude, busy webmasters, etc etc you name it. All web hosting service providers have to expect all these kinds of people come to your virtual door, especially when freebies attract more abusers, but many who establish free hosting services have the "hostlord" approach overwhelmed their mind.
Some free hosting offers are notably immature, like Starcraftmazter puts it - "silly kiddy hosts". I won't comment on grammar and spellings on the free web hosting offers as there are many international providers who are simply not fluent in English - I'm talking about their TOS. Yes I do read all TOS of any free hostings that I come across, and you should too. "Kiddy hosts" can be best identified from their TOS/rules and FAQ section - if they ever got one. This statement is only false when you tell me that there are international providers who don't know that it is inappropriate to use profanity/aggressive terms in TOS. Even in the offering advertisement - in forum posts or at their service website - you can identify immature or aggressive expressions coming from a native English speaker.
Those kind of free services with obvious lack of dedications make me think "why do they even bother to offer their services for free?". Efil has made a lot of sense about this with the "hostlord" theory.
Of course, the Internet is also a large world with many possibilities. There ARE dedicated free hosting services out there, often behind the disguise of limitations that usually drive people away such as big-brother resource usage monitoring (strict check on bandwidth, contents etc), quality forum posts requirements, low upload limits and last but not least, ad-support. In my opinion, a real good free hosting would know its limits and keep itself humble and strict to prevent resource overload from having too many users, perhaps before the admin's generous server upgrade.
Great post Efil. Cookie for you.
And... flame on
