Where do free hosts get their income from ??

D

.::DefCon::.

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I was just wondering: how do free hosts make a living? :confused:
I mean, there are lots of them that make (little to no) money from ads they place, but that's not enough to even pay server rental, right? :rolleyes:
 
Advertisements and Spamming people.

I hosted a free host, kicked them off because of the spamming. They refused to stop saying it was thier right and a freedom of speech.

I told them it was my freedom of pipe, and they were not using it anymore, seeya.

They tried to take us to court, and lost in pre-trial.... We got one hell of a counter though, still have not seen a dime.....
 
Thats what my question was

I asked the same thing in another post. I dont understand how they make any decent money. Although I think thats why alot of them go in and out of bussiness or get bought out by bigger companies.

I know they make their money buy selling their customers e-mail addresses and selling ad space on all the hosted sites. I just did't think there was alot of money in that. I think I stand corrected know though.
 
Most more than likely make barely any profit, the reason you seen them coming and going like the wind. The ones that do stick around for a while more than likely make their money off advertisements.
 
actually they dont make any profit
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Some do by sticking huge banner advertisements left, right, center of their website or even popups. You'll find then they profit it by selling it off.
 
Don't forget account upgrades :) Upselling them to larger plans etc...

There can also be other benefits of free hosting, other than profit, in terms of more exposure etc... - you get a big base of people that could potentially purchase other services or products you offer (for example: content management system, script installation services, design templates etc...).

It's possible, just rather hard to do ;)
 
I tried my hand briefly at being a free host. It wasn't for me.

The money from ads was not terrible. If you find the right way to set things up, you can do fairly well. It certainly won't be a huge money maker by any means, but you can bring in a little.

The thing is, most free hosts come and go. There are very few of the big boys that stick around and most of them have other services they run that are often tied on such as paid hosting.
 
It certainly won't be a huge money maker by any means, but you can bring in a little.
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Then off course, comes volume. Not for you and me, but certainly there are companies that have the ability to go big, and earn big.
 
I used a free host a long time ago. I think that most of their money comes from advertising - most have a banner at the top of the page, or to the side. Some do pop ups.

Then they try to continually upgrade you too. $2 a month or so to remove the banners from the site. Usually you are on a subdomain of their site as well, so they may try to sell you a domain name.

I have seem some free sites that get pretty impressive traffic, so the ad revenue overall must not be too bad if you host a lot of sites.
 
The Free Web Hosting Industry is declining as new "businesses" begin to breach out and provide extremly cheap services with high resources which appeals to people more.
 
Then off course, comes volume. Not for you and me, but certainly there are companies that have the ability to go big, and earn big.
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Right. That's another reason in itself why you see the bigger boys that stick around. The ones that can afford to put a pretty into things initially and wait out the profit that will ultimately come out of their work. Ad payouts are not terrible if you know what you are doing and can really accrue to a large amount over time.
 
free hosts can sell their ad slots on their free users sites. they can make alot of money off that. hence 200+ sites, with 1-2 banners on them, and a host can sell the slots for 5,10, even 30+ $$$ u can make alot of money off it.
 
The money generally comes from either ads or mailing lists.

Free hosting isn't really 'free'. There's always a cost. Ads on each site is probably the most common way and a close second is requiring forum posts into some forum that the free host runs. By having a steady stream of new forum posts, they can place ads in those forums and make some income off them.

We tried it for about 6 weeks once. It was way too much hassle for an undetermined return.

There's no doubt that some people can make a lot of money doing it, though.
 
I don't think anyone providing free hosting for 100% Free. There's always a catch, For an example, some of the Big hosts i knw provide free hosting for posting on their forums/blogs etc, or for placing a link back to their site, and some use it as a brand promotion strategy.

Even Netfirms offer free hosting, and i kinda like their free hosting strategy
 
Even Netfirms offer free hosting, and i kinda like their free hosting strategy
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A good while ago, they were mainly a "free host" deriving money from ads placed on the users' sites. These days, they're a budget host, and their free hosting is there more as a legacy than anything. A side effect of being one of the larger free hosting providers used to be a good search engine ranking for hosting related keyphases.
 
The hosting for posting model has really taken off in the last year. I think that it's a great idea personally--as long as they have some kind of focus and don't create some huge "general chat" forum that's littered with spam and nonsense.

Free hosting is just waiting for some great idea that will make it profitable and still have some quality to their services.
 
I first set up offering free hosting accounts. I didnt make cash out of advertisements. I used the "free" way of hosting to build a ramp to launching the site. A nice chunk of accounts were created and then I launched the paid hosting which got my brand name out around the world. I then dropped the free hosting and went on from there. I still honoured the free accounts and a good number stayed active for a while.
 
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