Free hosting strategy

C

charlesgan

New member
(seem like its the right place to post this here)

i am very new to free hosting service, and its a very tricky business as i seen. Here is what i 'planning'
(not promoting myself, i not yet have this service)...

"100MB of free hosting space, 1GB bandwidth, cpanel, fantastico, pop email, Mysql, PHP for sure, etc etc. But, with ads on footer, no other ads, no forum posting. Will this free hosting be attractive enough?

...and As per your experience or opinion, how many signup will i gain per mth??
 
Charles,

There are a lot of free hosting providers out there and the competition for quality non-abusive members is high. Look at what the major free hosting houses offer like Bravenet, DotEasy, and then you'll see your plan pretty much just matches their offer. I don't think this will be quite enough. Then there are smaller independent companies that offer up to 10-20 GB of monthly traffic to their users. However, you have to keep in mind that the more resources you offer - the more you open up yourself to abuse.

Best,
 
My experience and advice is to stay away from the free hosting arena unless you have some serious funds to invest. What you're offering right now is not quite on the level with some of the established free hosting providers out there.
 
Giving your product away for free sends a negative image of your product's quality. Think about it, how often do you look at the free papers over USA today...

Food for thought.
 
inlethost said:
Giving your product away for free sends a negative image of your product's quality. Think about it, how often do you look at the free papers over USA today...

Food for thought.
Click to expand...
Actually I don't agree with this either. Giving a product away for free isn't a bad thing if there is a strategy behind it.

There is nothing wring with free papers either. If you limit yourself to the possibility of profiting from free products or gaining information from free sources, then you limit your capabilities to succeed or make an informative decision.
 
Actually I don't agree with this either. Giving a product away for free isn't a bad thing if there is a strategy behind it. - TOTALLY Agree.

The Strategy I would suggest is having a contingent plan or a secondary system in the background which will earn you money. It could be something connected to hosting or totally not connected.

Example:

Yahoo offers Free Email Storage.
ON the Other side they earn from ads.

OR

Company X offers Free WebHosting
Company X also deals in some other non related business where they earn lots of money and use some of it to offer free webhosting .

Nothing wrong with it as long as youre earning some sort of return (wheter its money or trust or value or brand).

Regards
 
Well, it's VERY hard to find reliable free hosts. Most that I've seen either sell out or shut down. I guess if you have ads placed or get donations, it might help you out. OR, if you have some free customers and some paid customers. That will help you cover server costs and still allow you to give out some free hosting.
 
I started off back in 2001 by offering free hosting. I was opening a fair few accounts per day. For me the purpose was to get the message out about the hosting company I started. 6 months after opening I then had a whole new site design done and did away with the free plans. A few clients converted over from free to paid, but I was seeing a fair bit of traffic as all the free clients were using theirname.myhostname.com. Sign ups did great to the paid plans.

Back then I offered something like 10Meg of space with no control panel, no email and maybe 100 meg of transfer. A couple of abuse cases happened but I quickly shut those down.

I am not in the hosting buisness any more as I came out a few months ago to try other things. The business still does well and is still running today. I do not know if I would go that route again if I were to start hosting again.
 
It seems like the best way to get your name out there, is through advertisement. Also, theres a number of websites that you can advertise on.
 
Well there are tons of free hosting providers you can easlily find them on net... i found something for you...


<<MOD NOTE: Advertising is not allowed. Please read the Rules.>>
 
Unless you have the money to invest in staff to monitor your free services 24/7/365, don't bother.

Seriously, offering free hosting is not a bad thing, if it's something you can police fairly well.

Not very very long ago, our company used to offer a free hosting alternative to our premium hosting services, and almost every member found a way to abuse it....

porn, warez, video, mp3's, cracks, etc

Basically, if it was listed as a "no no" in the Free service TOS, they threw it up there, until the server itself said "wtf were you thinking!!?", and started running real slow, etc, until we eventually had to give the server a flu shot, and the free members the boot.
 
This depend of what type of free hosting you want, a charity free hosting or a source of income which mean ADS, tons of ads.

You should make a list with what other free hosting websites are offering.

Peoples loves free things so good luck.

I also have a free hosting website that is running for some months but i am not counting on it for any income for the moment but maybe in the future it will be a good advertising place for my service who knows.


The sign up rate depend of how much you will advertise, but of course NO POSTS,NO ADS will attract more users but will lower your income and you will become the red cross of the web hosting.
 
I'd be careful with a free hosting service
you will need:


1) Volunteers to handle the sign ups and approving/disapprove
2) High conversion ratio to paid upgrades to generate income
3) Passive ad income to at least cover the servers costs
4) High level of security, mainly phishing protection and email protection since free accounts are notorious for warez files, phishing, mass spam, fraud, bots, viruses and much more.
5) Have some form of automated bot sign-up protection to prevent mass sign ups
 
I don't really subscribe to the idea to giving something free when it is costing you as a company. It does not portray you as a stable company either. I would advise you to start a paid hosting company.
 
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