I own smokeymonkey.com and thanks to Chiken it is finaly working throught mydomain.com. But know I have come up with a bigger probleme. I can not find a free host that has no adds and will not steal my content. If you know of any host that offer this please tell me thank you.

You should check over at freewebspace.net to do a search or post to the forums for such a host.

I see this type of post a lot, and often wonder the following, perhaps some of you can help enlighten me:

1) Why would someone give away such a service? I mean, no ads, so how do they earn the $$ to afford the equipment, connectivity, support staff, etc? Seems iffy.

2) Why is there more and more an expectation that this can and should be available? I see lots of people looking for free hosting with no strings attached. Television is free because there are commercials. If you don't want to see ads during your movies, you get cable or satellite. You don't see people posting to find a free cable provider who doesn't show commercials...

I must be missing the big picture. I mean, there are enough of us out there who offer low-cost plans, if you're serious about your website you should be able to invest a few dollars a month into it. I just wonder why folks think they should be able to just drop their website onto the net and not pay for hosting (talking strictly about domain hosting here, not yourisp.net/~yourname). And assuming there are free hosts with no ads - where does the revenue come from? Even "free" ISPs like NetZero bombard you with ads and proprietary interfaces...money's gotta come from somewhere.

Please help the clueless. :confused:

p.s. ASD: this isn't personal, I do hope you find what you're looking for. Just want to understand the phenomenon.

It took me sometime to realize that the internet was not 'free' at all when I had started hanging around on net.

Perhaps, he is in the same case as I had been.

Originally posted by shpilkus
1) Why would someone give away such a service? I mean, no ads, so how do they earn the $$ to afford the equipment, connectivity, support staff, etc? Seems iffy.

Craig, believe it or not, it does exist and I don't know why either. I also annoy people at freewebspace.net too (heh), and see some pretty outrageous requests for free hosting. Basically they are looking for paid package features.

Now, if you are willing to be reasonable, meaning you are willing to forego 500MB of space and cgi, sql, etc., then there are a few places that are decent (though complained about often for being slow).

Problem is, without revenue there isn't much desire to keep the servers running fast (by not packing 3,000 accounts on it), and adding another server costs money.

There are often new hosts who come there with their home computer and cable ISP, and offer the world plus 10 MBs, until a week later when they *poof*.

It becomes more a question of how long they will last.

/Start Sarcasm
Dun suppose anyone knows where I can get a Quadruple 5000 Gigaherts server with 50 gigs of ram with unlimited space and bandwidth all for free?. And NO banners. If they put banners I WILL TAKE MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE!!!!
/End Sarcasm

Ok, so that's a bit overboard, but so is a lot of the stuff people expect from free hosts.

**Why would someone give away such a service? I mean, no **ads, so how do they earn the $$ to afford the equipment, **connectivity, support staff, etc? Seems iffy.

I offer a free service because it costs me very little and it drives traffic to my site, which offers paid-for hosting. This is mostly true for other free providers. And it's not necessarily true that they offer a bad service - if you were trying to persuade a client to buy webspace from you would you offer them a free package which gave them a bad impression?

Even with ads, it's hard to make money. The advertisors are hard hit, so are reluctant to spend the money. Banners dont generate the expected hits and most people simply ignore them. About the only way an fwp can truly be started and survive is as sruonline.co.uk said, have a pay service to make money from. The best way is to have a number of pay services, and advertise on your own free host. Be an advertisor, but be your own ad network as well so it doesnt cost you anything. At least that's how I have exceeded so well at it.

Then as Chicken said, you have to be wary of the new ones. Lotsa of kids start an fwp on their home pc and cable connection using the everyday free or cheap fwp software such as webhome or homefree.....then the next month or so, you see not hide nor hair of them. Even ones that have been around a while are having probs (Netcabins, RedRival, Crosswinds), and then, even the ones with $millions$ in backing are shutting down (GO.com). There is no longterm guarantee when it comes to free hosts. Even Geo and Xoom are losing huge amounts of money......how long till enough is enough and someone shuts them down? Free Hosts are good to start out on, but get to a pay host as soon as you can afford it.

I offer a free service because it costs me very little and it drives traffic to my site.
Point taken, but what would you do if 1500-2500 people took you up on your offer and none bought anything free. Could you still support them with equipment, personnel, etc?

The concept is certainly sound, offering a 'free sample'. And I agree that you want to show your best efforts to the free people in the hopes that they will become paid people. But if the sample were so good, why would anyone pay for the paid hosting?

Thanks for the insight though, it answers some questions.

Hmm, I dont know what I would do if that happened. I was lucky in that we have over 20,000 members on our free service, and have close to 200 paid accounts since we officially opened Pro on Jan 1.

Any way you go about it, the two services support will each other. However, you have to have a LOT of free members to do so, because roughly only 10% are going to switch over at any given time. I have noticed lately a lot of people signing up with the free just to check things out prior to going to pay. Unfortunatly, this results in bloated member counts for the free, which I try to keep as accurate as possible by killing off unused accounts.

I wonder how many actual LIVE accounts Geo and Xoom have..LOL

Of course you have to limit free services which you provide (often by limiting bandwidth) but with a fully-automated ordering system, no support offered and otherwise a fully-featured service, it really doesn't matter how many visitors want to signup for the free service, even if they never do buy a hosting package!

There's the rub: limit things, no support. Are they really getting a sample of your service then?

And as for me, if I have X slots available on a server, every one that is filled by a free customer is lost revenue. It might be potential revenue later, but it's still costing something to maintain, and limiting the # of paying clients you can put on that box.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure there must be a way to do this properly and profitably or it wouldn't be done.

I wasn't referring to my service with the no support comment, but certainly under high-demand this would have to be done. I know of a few hosts who resell services and their TOS often don't limit bandwidth unless it's very excessive - so nothing stops these people (who usually have their own colocated servers also) to use a reseller account to host free domains and their coloc. servers to do the job properly - they just do it because it increases traffic to their website, that's usually the name of the game for free hosts (apart from banner ad. ridden sites of course).

I do not really think that free webhosts without ads actually exist. All free webhosts have ads, bigger or smaller. I recently switched to Webhosting Media from the yahoo hosting (that was free but sucked big deal).

Unfortunately Webhosting Media was even worse than Yahoo! Their service was so bad that I cancelled the account and switched back to Yahoo! They are a cheap webhost and I'd rather have those nasty ads!

Best Wishes
Knicks fan
iabloko1@my-deja.com

[Edited by Chicken on 02-05-2001 at 10:20 PM]

You don't say knicks... wow, they *must* be a terrible host!