There are some sites that offer so much storage and space on their servers and have hundreds of thousands of members, and they continue to grow. I always assume that in time the bills will catch up to them, but they are still going strong. Are these just owned by companies who dont miss spending thousands of dollars per month on servers or something? Because when they offer free services to everyone and you pay $200+ for every server that you own that has limited space and bandwidth, you often wonder how huge sites are able to provide so much for free. I am sure their banners cant pay for it all.

Just because they are offered, does not mean they are used.

If its a free host, they most likely get lots in advertising. Noone would offer it if it wasnt returning to them with a profit.

Yes but they are being offered and used due to the site's popularity. Thousands of pages containing huge files all for free. See I could do the same and offer everything for free, but that would mean tons of people would sign up and my bills would probably double while gaining no extra income. In all honesty, I see a lot of people that want everything to be for free, yet they do not offer anything for free themselves. I really dislike hypocrites that expect you to work hard and spend so much money so they can take advantage or your site and dont appreciate it. That is just how the world is I suppose.

I dont know how the future of online businesses will be if everything is offered for free, unless you are selling a unique product that noone can get anywhere else.

lexington, I think you haven't got an idea of revenue ads can generate!

if a site is using a lot of bandwith, that means traffic and traffic is $$$

Yes I can imagine since my site is faily large and there have been professional advertisement companies contacting me asking to place ads on my site for $3+ dollars per click, however noone clicks on those banners accept for a couple of times per day, and compare that to $1000 servers it doesnt add up.

Originally posted by lexington
Yes I can imagine since my site is faily large and there have been professional advertisement companies contacting me asking to place ads on my site for $3+ dollars per click, however noone clicks on those banners accept for a couple of times per day, and compare that to $1000 servers it doesnt add up.

People do click on those ads. I have some pay per impression ads running on my site and the click through on some sites is upto 4% (not that i'm getting paid for the clicks)
but my industry (gaming) is not that well paying, webhosting is another story. some serious money there.



and if you referering to the really big free hosts like freewebs.com they be part of a really big online business, and you don't know what they have up there sleeves!

another example is geocities do you really think they are making loss from thier offers? popularity also counts for a lot!

Most of these free hosts will proberbly have advertisers that pay a set fee anyway, rather than pay per click.

More than likely, this is how they can afford to do it.

Yes, but those sites are huge coorporations. Geocities = yahoo. etc. I see just regular sites owned by John Doe that are huge.