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.

Advertisements and donations(yeah right)..just advertisements lol

BANNER ADS... That's about it... Well, popups.

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.

Most free domain name providers make max of their money thru the forced ads the place on your sites...
rest maybe they are hosting on their ows servers

That these ads are somehow forced upon the users is a common perception. I don't see them as forced, as it is a well known fact that they will place those ads. What I do have a bit of beef with, is the notion of "free" hosting. Users are paying, just not with cash. It's essentially a barter.

I also own a free hosting website and i don't get any income from it yet, but i can support my free hosting service from the extra income that i earn from other activities ex: my paid hosting website.

I am planing however to use google ads on my free hosting website.

As many have stated above, they get their money from placing ads on the users websites. There is little to no money involved in it though. Thats why you see them come and go all the time!

Most free hosts have paid plans too. and possibly they make money through that.
Free gives them publicity and paid ones money

most by upgrades or if they have there own dedicated servers.

I dont think a paid plan host should offer free hosting because people dont usually switch to the paid plan. usually teens and kids run for those free hosting offers.

not all free hosts are the same but let me tell you what some do.

1) offer free hosting knowing full well that a phising site will get on the server

2)as soon as the site is on the server the same anti phising software that hosts like use to block and remove the site, the start to monitor the url

3) once traffic starts to enter the site - they do a 301 redirect to a advertising landing page - this is because they know that a ton of spam went out from different servers directing them over that url which is redirected to a revenue generating page

how much money can somebody make??

i was chatting with one guy about a year ago as he was trying to sell his free hosting company to us
how does 15k a month sound?? yes 15,000 a month

I didnt want to run a business like that as part Rebel Networks so we walked away.

however, not all do it this way

we had this thought for a long time to try to generate links and traffic back to our paid hosting'through free hosting - however, we alway thought the loses will mount greater than the gains

As sated mostly from advertisements and spam. Remember to read the fine print if you ever decide to go with a free hosting company there is ALWAYS a catch.

We tried offering free hosting as a "taster" for the services and hopefully a way to get a "foot in the door" with eth clients to offer upgrades, additional services (dsl, domains, onsite setups etc) - it was *almost* exclusively used by Chinese students, spammers and warezers in the couple of weeks it was automated.

We then moved to amnaul approval process, but were getting over 300 requests/day, and whittling them down to *maybe* 10/day that got setup.

Sub 1% every upgraded to paid hosting so we stopped offering it, as those who want it frfee also seemed to need 3 times the amount of support of those prepared to pay.

Most of the money in the plethora of "freehosts" come in from advertising and then eventual selling of their "host" on sitepoint forums - having watched and examined a number of the sales of free-hosts, they're mostly running from $9.99 ebay "unlimited" reseller accounts ...