Hello everyone,

What are the problems with giving away free webhosting on a large scale? I'm sure there must be a lot...and this is something I want to do to bring extra traffic to my site. Being aware of the problems before I run into them would be very helpful. Does anyone know?

Losing money comes to mind.

--Tina

Well that one is the no brainer ;]
I'm not worried about the costs of it.

If money is no concern...then there is no problem that you can't overcome by giving away free hosting.

I would assume there are legal problems though.
Spam problems too.
How can I enforce people to comply with my rules if they aren't paying anything?

Its called "Terms of Service"....or "If you want to use our services, these are the terms." Doesn't matter if they are paying or not.

Should I have this written by a lawyer, or should I just write it myself?

Originally posted by Danoz
Hello everyone,

What are the problems with giving away free webhosting on a large scale? I'm sure there must be a lot...and this is something I want to do to bring extra traffic to my site. Being aware of the problems before I run into them would be very helpful. Does anyone know?

Don't just look at server costs etc. I persume if your offering free hosting some people are going to have queries etc. What will you be doing on the support side of things? Will you offer support? Few questions you need to ask and make clear in TOS.

Anjam

Originally posted by Danoz
Should I have this written by a lawyer, or should I just write it myself?

No need for an lawyer, you could better do by userself.

Just those users who do accept your terms of service, delete their a/c.

coz most or alomost all would accept your TOS, Coz now a days free hosts with good package are found very little or to say none.

If cost is of no concern, have a lawyer do it. No sense in wasting your time ;)

Be very specific in your terms of service about who is responsible for the things uploaded. I am sure that their might be problems with people uploading illegal things such as mp3's, pornography, and any other "BAD" things. You might be responsible for it since it is located on YOUR server(s).

Originally posted by webhoststalk
No need for an lawyer, you could better do by userself.


:eek:

Starting to sound like there are a lot of issues with this. Just take your time and cover each point thats suggested and you should be fine.

Anjam :pimp:

I am actually in the process of setting up my site to do free hosting. I am doing it simply because I have a love of hosting web sites, but i dont have the time to give support. I figure that if the hosting is free, they will not have many support questions.

I'm not planning on giving any support except for a FAQ.

I get the feeling that I'm going to be the one in trouble if the people I host for free are breaking the rules...I can delete them but I've already enabled their illegal activities.

I don't really want to spend the money on a lawyer, but if I have to I will...is there anyone experienced in this?

1. Look under "A" for attornies in the yellow pages
2. Pick one
3. Call him and tell him what you need

the only possible thing to do for the illegal activities would probably be to monitor there accounts from time to time. Maybe just set a day of the week where you will go through peoples files and search for BAD files. Thats the only way i see that it would be possible.

Originally posted by dirtbiker245
I figure that if the hosting is free, they will not have many support questions. what would lead you to believe that? it doesn't matter *how much* they're paying - even if they are paying nothing - they are going to have problems and questions.

that gives me an idea though...

FREE HOSTING!*
*(technical support: $300 per hour, 15 minute minimum. additional fee of $3.99 per minute applies. call us at 1-900-976-host)

yeah...

you know, that's a joke, but you probably *could* give away hosting but charge for support and still make a go of it...

Originally posted by dirtbiker245
the only possible thing to do for the illegal activities would probably be to monitor there accounts from time to time. Maybe just set a day of the week where you will go through peoples files and search for BAD files. Thats the only way i see that it would be possible. now you've gone from not providing support to spending one day a week looking for "bad" files...oh oh, this is starting to sound like work.

that is a good idea. Maybe i could have a help center forum and have google ads or other ads on it. Than I would be making money from the ads and providing support.

i am same with danoz. I am trying hard but my server is hosted in my bedroom. (Hey, it works)Its no extra cost for me either because my parents pay the internet bill. Its pretty good too: 1500kbps down/384kbps up.
I am just sorta worried about overworking my dsl line.

its all depends on your plans and stratagies

thats good. My site is only going to have ads on My homepage. The users sites will be ad free.

o. Well, I hope mine gets hits. I have one site that is hosted on ipowerweb that used 27 GB of transfer last month. But i have no ads on it.

Honestly there is really nothing wrong with free hosting. Another thing that you might want todo is offer a free hosting plan and offer serveral other plans at a cost so that way you can still make some money to cover the server / support costs.

Originally posted by dirtbiker245
the only possible thing to do for the illegal activities would probably be to monitor there accounts from time to time. Maybe just set a day of the week where you will go through peoples files and search for BAD files. Thats the only way i see that it would be possible.

The only thing about this is that if you dont find it before someone. and you can get into trouble because you know that there were illegal activities / files on your server.

Thanks
- James

Offer free hosting and have others advertise on your site. That's what we do. ;)
You can either 'outsource' support by pointing users to other common webmaster communities where they can get answers, or set up your own forum so that the members help each other, cutting down on your support costs.

You may make some money through banners if you decide to do that, but you could have another plan, as mentioned earlier that the customer could upgrade to with more space, data transfer etc. for a small fee.

I make exponentially more money giving away free hosting than I make on paid hosting.

For instance, there are some sites I host that can make me up to $1100 per month on ads whereas if I hosted them 'for pay,' I'd only be making about $20...

I'd rather have a free customer than a paid customer any day.

ericfire do you run google ads, general ads or both on them?
Do you give away any email adds or something?

thanks, Yaser.

I can't give away too many details. :) For obvious reasons. But I host a small amount of larger sites, not lots of smaller sites. I submit to get the ads approved on each site I host. Google ads generally don't pay that much for me... There are other companies, like

Burst, MaxOnline, FastClick, CasaleMedia, UGO, Realmedia, Adtegrity, UGO, Mamma, etc.

I use a combination of them.

I think there is a huge misconception about free hosting. It is a very legitimate business (nowhere in the league of 'unlimited' hosting). I don't know why WHT banned it.

I can understand eric :) thanks for the info.

So if someone wants free hosting they only get a website, can they have emails?

Ive seen quite a few hosts just limit it to website.

I take only established sites. I monitor the and tighten servers carefully for things like spam... If I were doing this on a larger scale (thousands of smaller sites), like Geocities or Tripod, I probably would not offer email. But I host less than 100 large traffic sites. I do offer email. All of my business comes from word of mouth. :)

Nothing better than word of mouth advertising :D great to hear! keep it up :D

Yaser

There do not have to be any problems with giving away free web hosting. Here are some simple terms I would put in place for myself, if I were offering free web hosting:

1. I would not host domain names, I would host subdomains/directories off of my main web hosting site.
2. I would not offer any support, other than maybe a FAQ, and some walkthroughs. I may even have a knowledgebase.
3. Limit file sizes, limit file types, and limit accounts. It is all about setting reasonable limits. Start small, and work up.
4. Create software that will run your free web hosting enterprise, and design the software to scan/monitor user accounts for unwanted material, and automatically get rid of it.
5. Keep your terms of service very specific, hold a zero-tolerance policy.
6. Keep everything web-based, do not allow FTP, make it so users have to upload files through a web browser, this will save you bandwidth, and it will discourage users from uploading tons of files.
7. I would recommend not allowing zip files for download, no exe files, and keep some sort of hot-linking protection so users can not abuse your banwidth with external linking.

I hope that this can be of some use to you, if you follow the above ruleset, you should not have too many problems giving our free web space.

To Yaser:

Thank you! :)

I read the rest of this thread, and to comment on legal problems - if you plan to run it on a large scale and accept any and every site (in which case you could not verify that your users are legit), according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, service providers cannot be held liable for user uploaded content until they are officially notified about such from the copyright holder (at which point they must remove the user or the files). And they shouldn't be. Users are liable.

Were it not so, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc. would all be bankrupt by now because of their users' actions.

Originally posted by Danoz
Hello everyone,

What are the problems with giving away free webhosting on a large scale? I'm sure there must be a lot...and this is something I want to do to bring extra traffic to my site. Being aware of the problems before I run into them would be very helpful. Does anyone know?

I've stopped giving away hosting, because it didn't worth it.

"non paying customers" = "problems"

The number one problem you will have is spam. If you offer php/cgi it will be spam originating from your server. Even if you don't offer php/cgi, you are going to have to deal with spam advertised sites. Look for a datacenter that is willing to work with you to deal with the spam problem. The spam police even like to go after the nameservers that provided dns for the spam advertised sites. Again, my first recommendation is to find a good datacenter that will work with you even after getting thousands upon thousands of spam complaints.

I also suggest keeping a good record of all your customers. This should include name, address, phone, ip addresses, email addresses, etc. of the person signing up for an account. Also keep good logs of the account, ip address, etc. that upload each file. I had the fbi come to my house looking for account information because one of my clients used their site to deliver a bomb threat against a school. The fbi showed up 3 months after the threat was made. Luckily we keep all the signup information, ip addresses, logs, etc.

Good luck finding an ad agency that will let you put banners on free sites. Most ad agencies will eventually get around to deleting your account because of illegal content, non-English content, spam, etc. I use my free hosting service to deliver more traffic to my niche sites, hosting sites, friends sites, etc.

Good luck.

Thankyou everyone for the help!

it's doable. hosting is cheap enought to do it. you can offer a little less than standard hosting say 5 email, 50mb, 5 gb bandwidth. i say use it as marketing tool to let people know your hosting company and reel them in when the freebie run out.

Ahh free hosting.. where do I begin?? ;)

Having been involved with with that side of the biz for a few years and running systems with hundreds of thousands of users I can tell you there are a few things to bear in mind..

If the user can screw you, the user will screw you
Monitoring every site is impossible except for very small hosts.. see above.
If you put ads on their pages, they will hide, remove or break them if possible (js, dhtml, etc)
If its a non-adult freehost, users will upload adult content
If its an adult free host, users will upload gigantic video files if you let them
users don't know the first thing about image compression.. prepare for 300k jpg's
you don't want to know thehun
your mrtg graphs will be nice
your bandwidth bill wont be (we were paying $30k/month at one time)
users are sneaky and tricky.. watch out for warez disguised as hundreds of images or html files
you will be VERY popular in china
you can't sell sh*t to chinese surfers
you will be very popular in japan..
you can sell them something but generally only in japanese and with the right product pitched the right way.. they are a fickle bunch
you will be hacked unless you have good security and a good sysadmin
users will spam and you get the heat
users will upload illegal content and sooner or later you will get a call from the fbi or some other agency working to track down the webmaster responsible for said illegal crap.

Other than that its fine.. :stickout:

Originally posted by poncho2000
I've stopped giving away hosting, because it didn't worth it.



I've found the opposite is true. We offer a free hosting package, which brings in alot of new customers who want to "kick the tires" before they upgrade to a paid account. Offering free hosting gets our name out there too, without much effort on our part.

--Tina

about china, so true
our signup page says in big letters, only people with a Canadian address, and we just wont add anyone who doesnt give one
but they still put in Chinesse addresses
over and over again!

I used to run a free webhosting service and man was it a headache. SPAM after SPAM after SPAM.

Users would fill up accounts with wazez (rename exe and zips to txt and doc files) and porn....man was it crazy....

I stopped doing it now cause it made no money and caused more problems.

webpromo maybe you should ask ericfire and galacnet for sometimes on free hosting 101 :)

Well you need to have a very clear cut TOS stating all the rights of a free user and that you have the right to scan through etc.

I didnt get a change to read MegaCGI post, but he is right..the following is what happened when i was doing my free hosting service:

Originally posted by MegaCGI
Ahh free hosting.. where do I begin?? ;)

If the user can screw you, the user will screw you
Monitoring every site is impossible except for very small hosts.. see above.
If its a non-adult freehost, users will upload adult content
If its an adult free host, users will upload gigantic video files if you let them
users don't know the first thing about image compression.. prepare for 300k jpg's
you don't want to know thehun
your mrtg graphs will be nice
your bandwidth bill wont be (we were paying $30k/month at one time)
users are sneaky and tricky.. watch out for warez disguised as hundreds of images or html files
you will be VERY popular in china
you will be very popular in japan..
users will spam and you get the heat
users will upload illegal content and sooner or later you will get a call from the fbi or some other agency working to track down the webmaster responsible for said illegal crap.

Other than that its fine.. :stickout:

Originally posted by AH-Tina
I've found the opposite is true. We offer a free hosting package, which brings in alot of new customers who want to "kick the tires" before they upgrade to a paid account. Offering free hosting gets our name out there too, without much effort on our part.

--Tina

You still make $5.00 on the accounts....and that is enough money to scare away thehun and warez site ppls

http://www.affordablehost.com/freehost.shtml

I think it would be best to actively search for good sites and offer them better free hosting then they already have ... maybe better then the paid hosting they already have ;)

i offer free hosting before, microsoft comes after me for my user is giving away pirated CDKey to others.. :( I just give microsoft all the information have have the user deleted

It might be best to start a new thread rather than digging up an old one.