Its always a good idea to help promote other projects & business's but simply just a stand-alone could become more than its actual value.

If you really want to be a popular quickly, do other techniques or give attractive discounts rather than free hosting.
As all said free hosting is nothing but pain.

you will get like 10 guys daily reqesting for free hosting and it will become dificult for you to control observer and manage the server situation properly ......... so better get clients and only give free hosting to your friends

Free hosting I think is good place to start. You will quickly learn what people that hide behind they're computers will do to abuse your good nature.

You will get every scam under the sun and there is no real way of filturing it out. The worst thing is when they are doing something highly illegal and could shut down your service and the services of other people on that server.

Is it profitable? Yes but only a few dollers or so.

Google Adwords on your home page alone can make you alot.

Advertising on the top directorys can make you big in no time!

Good reply Shine

Free hosting is good for networking, the positive of it is large amount of traffic which could help you promote other services/products/projects you may run.

I know this has been said but offering Free Hosting is not always the way to go.

I think everyone agrees that free hosting is not going to bring profit but more of aheadache.

But it will bring awareness to your hosting/reseller site like your thread reads People who maximize your free resources will most likely choose your solutions for hosting if they have good experience free.

PS: If you start something like this then close it down like alot of freehost do or they restrict/lessen resources lateron, something like that can actually help decline your business. Be careful.

If you are new I can tell you free hosting marketing can help you alot in learning alot of information about the market.

It also can be profitable by using Trialpay. My last payout from them was $167.

I would recommend promotting trialpay. I some countrys some of the offers are free and in others there are good trials that will cost 1$ and you get a average of 15$ in return for them paying 1$.

A few tips:

• When picking from your service you should get.... Reseller? VPS? Dedicated server? - Ok well starting out I would recommend going for a VPS. When looking confirm with the VPS sellers that there is NO three strict rule. The three trick rule is if you are reported for abuse 3 times you are to get off they're server basically.
• There is a book out there regarding free hosting with all the helpful information regarding everything you need to know. I first saw it on freewebhostingtalk.com a while back. In this pack are some helpful scanner scripts that he made. This is free book and scripts.
• Locate and reconize the high risk country. By denieing services to japan or India this can save you alot of hassle.
• WHMCS gives all they're users free MaxMind this could help filter out a lot of crap.
• Stick advertisment on the PHPMyAdmin, cPanel any user interface. This can be profitable and not forcing ads on your clients web pages.

Ok well thats some info I can give of the top of my head

I think free hosting is just like welcoming scammers to use your services, although you can have quick signups but of no use.

When you offer a completely free hosting service, you will see shortly that spammers, hackers, warez spreaders will be your clients. There are millions of users which does not pay for anything on the net.

Yes, have fun creating a spam pit.

We don't think that your site will be popular as soon as you star offering free hosting, remember that mainly free hosting is used by people who can't afford paid ones, and besides it most customer need good service and support, that is why many think that only paid hostings can give it.