I would like some input on the Free Webhosting business model.

How can it work?
What drives a company to offer this?
Have you tried it? If yes, are you still doing it? If not, why not?
How do you constrain abuse of the system?
Do you know of any legitimate company that has managed to do this for over a year?

Thanks!

the only one i know of is bytehosts or something like that.

i know a few that run free hosting companies and they make a reasonable amount of forced google ads on the account. they don't make enough to live on but a nice ide thing.

it is a lot harder running free to paid, abuse is massive and unless you manually check all the accounts often you won't be able to stop it. one method is admin approval but apart from that.

Free is pretty silly stuff - but some have managed to make a business out of it (8000 accounts on one server I've seen). Google AdSense with mod_layout installed on apache seems to work but I'm not sure how sustainable this model is.

Important thing to think about is that those "free" hosting customers expect a level of customer service like paying customers do. And in some sense, they deserve it because they are giving up precious real estate to those ugly google ads!

Roj

it can pontentially be very good.

i sponsor a couple of sites where they have put 1 google ad banner on each page. i make nearly 3 times the amount of money from them to someone purchasing the same package normally.

the main thing you have to think about is the hits. most free site will not have many hits, if any and they will always want a lot of space because they think (often dream) of it becoming a big site.

to make it worthwhile you would probably have to heavily oversell the server to get enough impressions of google ads.

another successful way to make the money is from forum posting. they have to post so many to get the free hosting and the forum is covered with ads.

I would like some input on the Free Webhosting business model.







Thanks!
How can it work?
Advertising revenue. :)

What drives a company to offer this?
Providing a service that has a very high demand, and can bring in a sizeable bit of money

Have you tried it? If yes, are you still doing it? If not, why not?
Yes; no; it was a side venture I was running by myself, and at the time I was not a security guru. We kept getting hacked, and I got sick of constantly restoring things, so I shut down. With the proper security measures in place, things would have worked out better. :) I've been thinking of trying again, sometime in the future.

How do you constrain abuse of the system?
It's hard to do - you basically have to really put limits on what folks can upload and what they can't (i.e. file types)

Do you know of any legitimate company that has managed to do this for over a year?
ZendURL.com, run by a friend of mine

There is a free script for running a free hosting service called Multihoster. Its creators have gone MIA, but I am now "sort of" maintaining the script. If you pm me your email address, I'll email you a copy.

Geocities, anyone?

Tons of free hosting companies have been absurdly successful.

Something to look at http://www.freewht.com/

i was hosting a friends site that got more 2000 unique vistors. i was making around 5 bucks a day from adsense. the site only need a $10 a month hosting. so you could make money, just have choose be pickly on who you host.

Have you tried it? If yes, are you still doing it? If not, why not?
... at the time I was not a security guru. We kept getting hacked, and I got sick of constantly restoring things, so I shut down. With the proper security measures in place, things would have worked out better. :) I've been thinking of trying again, sometime in the future.

How do you constrain abuse of the system?
It's hard to do - you basically have to really put limits on what folks can upload and what they can't (i.e. file types)

.... I'll email you a copy.

How far do you have to lock it down? WOuld a good security audit by someone like Rack911 do it or do you have to go further? Can you provide some samples of files that should not be uploaded?

PM sent for the demo of the script :)

THanks!

How far do you have to lock it down? WOuld a good security audit by someone like Rack911 do it or do you have to go further? Can you provide some samples of files that should not be uploaded?

PM sent for the demo of the script :)

THanks!Mainly, you need to make sure folks can't run SQL injection attacks. That was the main problem I had; I know how to correct it now, but then I did not. It wouldn't hurt to get a security audit, though; no harm could ever come because of it. I ended up blocking .exe, .php, and .cgi files specifically, mainly because I was getting things like proxy sites, and very resource-intensive (not to mention malicious) content with those three file extensions. If you block all three, you'd probably be fine (though some also block things like script extensions, etc.).

I'll get to that pm and send you a copy. :)

We're running a 1GB free hosting service for iranians only in persian language.
it's now more than 2 years that we're providing the service.
Reason for providing free hosting is that it made us famous in the country very fast. only after 1 month.
we haven't stopped it since stopping the service can hurt our customers trust.
We aren't using any force ads and that's the reason we're very famous in the country.
Our goal was making ourselves famous and we achieved it.

IR5, that's pretty interesting. How do you make your money if you are not running ads? I've always been interested in an alternative revenue model for free hosting, such as the one you employ.

IR5, that's pretty interesting. How do you make your money if you are not running ads? I've always been interested in an alternative revenue model for free hosting, such as the one you employ.

At a place I'm involved with we did that for a good while. Free hosting with no ads. A good few of them upgraded to paying accounts for more diskspace/bandwidth so paying users were subsidising the free users. But then it came to a stage where it was no longer worth it due to support time necessary and preformance issues that affected paying users (We didn't have a really powerful server to keep pace)

usually i hav seen a post2host factors........ the ads will be placed on there site and you hav to keep posting which increases the revenue.... and help them to keep server up

IR5, that's pretty interesting. How do you make your money if you are not running ads? I've always been interested in an alternative revenue model for free hosting, such as the one you employ.
We've became famous in the country as a Web Hosting Leader very fast and after a few months of providing free hosting without any problem, People trusted us.
So now, it's a good point for our company that we're providing free hosting for more than 2 years and never had any problem with serving our customers even free ones.
We sell them shared hosting and reseller accounts more easily.