I remember posts by people who wanted to start a free web host. Well, I'm telling you it's a BAD IDEA! There are way to many people who want free websites and I'll share from a past experience.:D

More than a year ago(I believe) I started some free hosting. I used some space from a server in which the resources weren't being used. After about 2 weeks of having my site up I had about 300 clients!! And they were using about 20gb bandwidth. Not only that, but I got so many emails each day about simple questions - 'how do I upload files?' and stuff. Eventually, I did shut down that plan. But I want to tell people who are looking at free hosting - you will be bombarded with sites. And do you want to provide support to 300+ clients for free?

I can't fathom why anyone would ever want to open up a free hosting service. Maybe back in the idiotic ad boom days, but now? Not in a billion years.

What about this post:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51627

Well, I didn't for a moment doubt that there were people foolish enough to consider such things....I only said I couldn't imagine doing it...

For anyone who is STILL planning to start a free host, let me give you some tips:

- Ads are NOT bad. Ads that are really annoying are, but if you hav have non-intrusive ads, there is nothing wrong with them. You can program them to be top and bottum of each page, content oriented, etc. and they compliment the page.

- Offer no technical support. Have a knowledge base, and a "Delete my account" page. Provide some links to ]services such as SitePoint, HTMLite, etc., but let them figure out what to do, afterall, you're not being paid.

- Be vehement about blocking spam. Failure to do so could cause you a lot of problems.

- No CGI's. Don't allow CGI, PHP, or MySQL, they'll hog resources, make a great venue for spam, and could be determental to your servers if put in the wrong hands. You could provide pre-installed CGI, but nothing else.

- Keep accounts small, 5-20 MB, and restrict bandwidth.

- Filter *.p3 files unless you want to pay a lot in bandwidth costs.

The best advice is to never start a free hosting service, but if you're going to do so, take A LOT of advice from people on this board. I would also suggest following the GeoCities model. Their model seemed to work fairly well. Sure they had crappy service, but no body's paying for it except the premium members.

Originally posted by mas3000
I remember posts by people who wanted to start a free web host. Well, I'm telling you it's a BAD IDEA! There are way to many people who want free websites and I'll share from a past experience.:D

More than a year ago(I believe) I started some free hosting. I used some space from a server in which the resources weren't being used. After about 2 weeks of having my site up I had about 300 clients!! And they were using about 20gb bandwidth. Not only that, but I got so many emails each day about simple questions - 'how do I upload files?' and stuff. Eventually, I did shut down that plan. But I want to tell people who are looking at free hosting - you will be bombarded with sites. And do you want to provide support to 300+ clients for free?

I think you just had a bad experience or you did not check for accounts with warez and file storage which used up all your bandwidth
I am making quite a bit of money from free hosting with advertising