One of my friends has free hosting running on their server and on same server, they also have paid hosting. They have been cruising well for past four months now. But is this a good strategy to have free and paid on same server?

Well it could turn into a problem.

The reality is that the free service will attract a lot of users, and may not leave much room for paying customers. It really depends on how our friend limits the free hosting accounts and their specs.

The main problem I see, is how well behaved the free users are going to be, given how there's probably no way to hold them accountable for any trouble they cause.

Having run a free host I can say you are 100% correct. In my experience, free hosting users have a far higer rate of TOS violations than paid customers do. They also seem to get DDOS ( and other script kiddie hacking) attacked alot more.

You know free hosting is a free hosting. Nothing can be done with that.

What? Please explain.

I think accuurrtt means that you can't change it to paid or do much with it without loosing clients.

You can ask customers who signup for free hosting to scan and mail/fax their ID. This will scare off abusers.

Just make sure to take a close look at them, some spammers go as far as putting fake licenses/ID's as well.

That's true, but most spammers won't bother forging licenses or ID's if they can get free hosting elsewhere without going through the trouble.

Laff...exactly. You just want them to go somewhere else.

It's like an old army maxim: "You don't have to out run the enemy. You just have to out run your buddy".

Well at least running a free web hosting company won't get you shot

Depends on the neighbourhood

It depends on many things, whether they are hosting htem on a good, high quality server and if they are in a reliable datacenter.

A bad free web hosting server manager team group could have the server in a special DDoS free datacenter (usually really expensive etc, but they exist) and having 99% uptime and have happy customers.

On the other hand, you could have a good bunch of people who know what they are doing and be put in a bad datacenter for who knows why and have a terrible 50% uptime.

It depends on your budget really, and where the datacenter is.

I wouldn't say DDoS "free", just DDoS protected...

If the botnet is big enough, and if it's attacking in a way that makes it hard to detect which IP's are attackers and which IP's are regular visitors, it would be extremely hard to filter the correct IP's. In that case, the DDoS protection hardware will either be unable to block it, or incorrectly block it and thus also lock out regular users. Fortunately, such botnets are rare and script kiddies often use attack methods that aren't too hard to block (meaning that the bots will all behave similar, making it easier to distinguish these connections from the rest).