I am interested in setting up a free hosting service like http://www.xism.net/ - but with advertising (no domain hosting). I need a simple cheap control panel that can be used to do this. I clearly don't need domain managers, billing etc... Any suggestions.

(the free hosting is part of something else, so please no threads telling me advertising isn't profitable)

thanks in advance

:cool:

Try cgi-resources.com they have perl scripts that many free hosts use to create account for other users.

To my knowolage the top one is solutionscripts.com. I use it. The new version has been comming out for the last year. Few bugs, easy setup, under 300. There are cheaper, but this is the best.

I'll tell you right now you better have some kind of scripting/hacking ability for running a free host and alot of
atience too.


There are many hundreds of scripts out there to exploit these free servers, even with the most advanced security features in use... This makes it a nightmare to administer
and a constant problem to deal with...

Let me explain in detail some things that will happen.

1. You setup your free hosting categories.... In HomeFree the script mentioned above....You select how many homes are allowed in each category defined.. say you allow 25 new free home pages to each of the following accounts.


Say these categories to choose from are
1. Airplanes 25 open
2. Motorcycles 25 open
3. Cars 25 open

A hacker, hereout referred to as lamer simple takes his script,
puts it up on a hacked account somewhere, and edits the categories on your site, puts in the signup urls, etc.

This lamers script is a nph-script, so now its being run from a server somwhere being filtered by a proxy list
of oh 50000 proxies.. Which now prevents you from banning him easily :)

His script.. will go to yahoo.com or hotmail.com free email services.
signup for an free amail account, signup to your services, scan the email for the password and then even upload, porn warez, or just creating the accounts themselves is a nightmare.

He sets this in a crontab job to run every 30 minutes.
24 hours and your slots are filled.... You can't leave this high, or he'll run it every minute.

So get ready to block all free email services you can possibly find.. even then, these guys know where to get those oddball ones easily enuff. Well with that said.. most of your real signups will be blocked as well.. everyone uses these accounts.

Thats just one of the problems, next comes, the warez, porn,
and other fraud, including spamming to these URL's.

50 emails a day from poeple who have no clue what HTML is,
have them figure out a control panel uploading feature? lol

Recode the signup proccess and other admin access areas
and put massive security steps in between..

Hand pick the additions.. if there are any real ones to be added.

give up, because its just lame.. 99.95% of the signups never use the accounts anyhow. and you aint gonna make much money from links/advertisements if it was working honerably let alone with the 5000000000 scammers on your site.

Sorry to bother your dreams. But if you ask me.. a free host is a nightmare with no revenue in it to be considered.. its like selling stale donuts to a bakery.

As much as I HATE to admit it. Blofish is in everyway right. Those are the reasons I stopped doing this. Of course there are ways to slow it down. Such as not allowing signups from email addresses ie yahoo hotmail, giving out a low amount of space. The other ways are more if you can hack scripts. I know some people now are making users type in random numbers from images not text. Its a hard buissness to run, I have recived threghts from lawyers, one that almost would of costs 60k just to defend.

You forgot the monthly phone calls from multiple police agencies investigating illegal activities on your servers.

Dont leave out how to pay for it.....the Ad market is crap for the past year....and wont get better any time soon.

Its certainly nice to see a free hosting provider without ads from the surfers' point of view ...but how are you going to cover the costs for the servers?:cartman:

Advertising ;) I've considered doing newsletter-advertisements as opposed to banners, but the cons outweighed the pros.

It's much better to co-brand a free hosting service with a real hosting provider. You'll get 50% of banner impression from member websites, but actually someone else runs the server for you. So you'll have less trouble.

The problem is that few sites left offering such kind of service to let you offer free hosting on your site.

Although, if you are still considering free web hosting, you could possibly require that all signups already have a site. Make them prove it, like putting your name or some random line of characters into their site.

If you wanted to offer full-featured free hosting, you could go with a Cobalt RaQ.