Do you offer any free accounts?
Are you hosting any accounts for free at the minute?
Do you offer the free hosting just to help people out, because you are interested in what they are doing, to advertise on their site or another reason?

Hello,

I know many people offer free accounts. There is an advantage to them for many reasons.

We, as a rule do not host free accounts. We have done it a couple of times for worthwhile causes (fund raising sites in our communities that were only temporary, etc...)

This is a business afterall. If we want advertising, we pay for it.

my $0.02

disclaimer
(I know lots of companies will offer free hosting, and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it - this is just our philosophy and may not be right for everyone)

Hehe no need to add a disclaimer here

With free accounts you are paying for the advertising, you are paying for the site which you are giving out for free.

A lot of companies run on a business model of offering a lot of free accounts along with premium accounts which can be used to cover a lot of thier costs incurred by giving out the free accounts.
Netfirms have a similar model to this but they dont just go on upgrades from free to premium or people purchasing premium accounts, they also advertise on all free sites they host.

<!--QuoteBegin-John Diver+Oct 20 2003, 05:57 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (John Diver @ Oct 20 2003, 05:57 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Hehe no need to add a disclaimer here

With free accounts you are paying for the advertising, you are paying for the site which you are giving out for free.
[/b][/quote]
Agreed,

but there are ramifications to your paying customers, particularly once you grow. and what started out as a nice gesture or an advertising stream, starts affecting the performance of your servers for your paying customers.

Bottom line for us is, if you're generating alot of hits, you shouldnt be asking for free hosting... Just our philosophy, not necessarily the right philosophy

I offer a lot of FREE accounts...some it is just for advertising sake and others because I want to help them out...

FastNet,

Wonderful to hear. Im sure you have satisfied many people with that philosophy

I sponsor a few clients, smaller ones, that advertise.

<!--QuoteBegin-Andrew+Oct 20 2003, 07:10 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Andrew @ Oct 20 2003, 07:10 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> FastNet,

Wonderful to hear. Im sure you have satisfied many people with that philosophy [/b][/quote]
Thank you Andrew

We have a few sites that we sponsor. We tend to only sponsor sites that meet certain requirements. All my sponsored sites are high on googles ranking and get alot of traffic from audiences that would click on a hosting banner (IE not a pokemon site) I guess we have about 10 sponsored sites in total. I have found that sponsoring high traffic sites does give us more referals and traffic. Also if your link is on sites that are highly ranked in google, your own google ranking goes up. Also the few times a sponsored site got TOO big for a shared/sponsored hosting, they were more then happy to pay for an account rather then move since they liked my service

some time I offer free account for advertising

I find that less and less people tend to click on the banners that get placed on free web hosts. Places lice Lycos always show the same adverts and so people usually get pretty sick of seeing it and eventually they just get annoyed by it. I don't know about you guys but that's how it is for me.

Yeah banners never seemed to work for me, but sure does not hurt when you are only offering tiny bits of space/bandwidth.

Yeah thats true but then again...
I probably checked banners for any new free hosts I saw, I only stopped when I had seen the banner before and thats not likely to happen if its a small host doing a few free accounts

If I see a banner for a web host I have never seen before I tend to click it just to check it out and see what I've missed.