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Why do providers offer free hosting?
- Thread starter gotlinks
- Start date
^^ And they display lots of ads. I honestly think that is the only way to truly make a lot of money. But it also doesn't endear you to your users, and only works for truly established free hosts. In the meantime, I think a strategy involving a "run-of-the-site" sponsor on a long-term basis could produce a couple of thousand dollars per month, but what kind of a sponsor would be a good fit for a free hosting company?
Well said XSIS, we offer a free hosting plan without ads; we have a link back to our site. Our site is limited in size and databases but almost all of our features are available. It gives our free hosters the opportunity to see what we offer, the quality of our service and servers; we hope that all free accounts will eventually upgrade to one of our paid accounts.
Keith
I give hosting away because I received it free. I am just giving back. I rent some servers. I sell VPSs on the servers then take the profit. I take a small chunk out of that and I do free hosting. Simple. David Uratie (chromehost.com) got me started. I then got a free reseller from hom (freeresellers.com). Then I did free hosting. Then I purchased a dediated server. Then I started free hosting. its a perfect circle. sorry about all of the "then"s ^^
financial backing on a car or a house makes perfect since, financial
backing on offering free hosting with no ads does not make since, and at that most seem to fail. Steping back and looking at this, hosting does not seem to be a strong viable business, maybe for some, but most will fail.
Some can fail yes, and the majority do. All i'm saying is, is that if someone is kind enough to do so and have abolsutely no income at all. Whats wrong with that.
Well said Jonny.
If someone wants to offer free hosting. Don't try to understand why. All they are trying to do is give back to the community... So why not let them?
NWH Networks
New Member
I do this because I like helping others HOWEVER the other part is that free providers usually make some income from ad's or advertising free services which then people will upgrade to paid hosting if the service is good.
Providers provide free hosting because they can make money of the ads they place on people websites....
NWH Networks
New Member
Well I dont place ad's I just put donation button, and offer paid hosting with it.
No-Post/No-Ad services are Entry-Leaders
I believe the mistake here is considering this service in a vacuum. You are correct that quitting a job to "make a fortune running" that service is a disaster. More accurate is to view it as the adjunct service to some other strategy.
A. Lead-In to Paid Hosting.
Unfortunately, ads are ugly and posting into a non-existent forum wastes time. So a low-powered free-site is a way for users to test the service response of a much stronger company. After seeing first hand that the site tech is not a jerk and at least tries to do something, the user would stick the name in the back of his head for when he might need a high powered solution. "100 megs/1GB bandwith free, 25Gigs/100GB bandwidth for $12/month". Or some such deal.
B. Chaining Reptutation
When a site is under construction, all "page not found errors" are sources of traffic for the reseller, and they do slowly make money. Suppose I make a colossally ambitious site, not too bad on bandwidth but with spaghetti links everywhere. The original visitor might be impressed that the reseller can handle the big original site, and start investigating hosting their own site there.
C. Learning-Zones
A 5-mb site with nearly-zero traffic... doesn't hurt your space or your bandwidth now, does it? So offer it free... because it's all about ramping up the world usage of the web. I fall in this category. I've dabbled with fun little pages for years, and I make zero demands on service. But I need a place to test in realtime what a page actually looks like. Some day I'll graduate into becoming a flashier customer who then can earn someone's way by traffic... but not without slowly developing the experience somewhere.
I believe the mistake here is considering this service in a vacuum. You are correct that quitting a job to "make a fortune running" that service is a disaster. More accurate is to view it as the adjunct service to some other strategy.
A. Lead-In to Paid Hosting.
Unfortunately, ads are ugly and posting into a non-existent forum wastes time. So a low-powered free-site is a way for users to test the service response of a much stronger company. After seeing first hand that the site tech is not a jerk and at least tries to do something, the user would stick the name in the back of his head for when he might need a high powered solution. "100 megs/1GB bandwith free, 25Gigs/100GB bandwidth for $12/month". Or some such deal.
B. Chaining Reptutation
When a site is under construction, all "page not found errors" are sources of traffic for the reseller, and they do slowly make money. Suppose I make a colossally ambitious site, not too bad on bandwidth but with spaghetti links everywhere. The original visitor might be impressed that the reseller can handle the big original site, and start investigating hosting their own site there.
C. Learning-Zones
A 5-mb site with nearly-zero traffic... doesn't hurt your space or your bandwidth now, does it? So offer it free... because it's all about ramping up the world usage of the web. I fall in this category. I've dabbled with fun little pages for years, and I make zero demands on service. But I need a place to test in realtime what a page actually looks like. Some day I'll graduate into becoming a flashier customer who then can earn someone's way by traffic... but not without slowly developing the experience somewhere.
