Originally posted by CareBear
Try looking at it from the opposite side.. if you have to make an effort to get an account it's likely there will be less people all stuffed onto one single server and they probably get a lot less abuse then hosts that have an instant free signup.
Free hosting is still something they offer you.. it's not a universal right. I think a few minutes of your time a day to contribute to their forums is a very reasonable thing in exchange for free hosting.
That is PRECISELY why we have the posting requirements!
It is implemented purely as a population control and also
serves as an ingenious way to filter and screen out people
we wouldn't want to host in the first place.
The posting requirements are actually very easy at
AMZ Web Hosting. While we see people that bawk at
the low numbers such as 10 posts for hosting and 50 posts
for MySQL, realize that most of our members have more
than 500 posts on their accounts!
We have a hidden forum for our top members where they
continually laugh about all the new visitors that complain
about the posting requirements as many of them once
made the same complaints at first and can laugh about
it now. I thought one guy was never going to survive
his first 10 posts he complained so loudly and now has
more than 1100 posts and is one of our moderators!
We only require 10 points to get a hosting account and
50 points to upgrade to MySQL access. This is usually
done in a day or two for most users that actively participate
in the community. It's incredibly easy.
The posting requirements have served our purposes very
well and have allowed us to remain fast and stable while
many other hosts have risen and fallen. The whole point
of the policy is merely to allow us to screen out unwanted
hosting users.
Statistically, any host that even attempts to match our
hosting account features doesn't last six months or becomes
very unstable almost immediately. Over the past two years,
we have held a 99.9% uptime and currently host more than
16,000 FREE web hosting accounts. Obviously the posting
requirement policy is a good thing.
If you are just so wimpy that you can't handle even
participating a little to earn your account, you can always
buy it instead. For $3.95 per month, we offer a paid commercial
account that has more space and features than the FREE
accounts without any of the posting requirments.