I have thought about purchasing a reseller plan from a company that is around $8/mo and offering a free hosting service (ad based) for customers. Of course it won't be on the same server as the paid accounts because that can bog things down. I was thinking along the lines of maybe

50mb of space
5Gb of bandwidth
1 Email account
3 Sub Domains
1 Ftp Account
Limited Tech Support

The only catch would be that every page will have a advertisement on it, probably a banner at the top promoting my hosting company. I was wondering what people think about offering free hosting to promote paid hosting and if this method actually works.


The way i would place the advertisements on their site is by modifying their .htaccess files to append & prepend a php file to all of their pages, giving me control of their content. the htaccess fille will also force .html files to be parsed by php. Any accounts that modify these files will instantly be terminated. Thoughts?

There is already plenty of ad-free free hosting, and managing sites that modify .htaccess will be an administrative nightmare.

Well, I am a php programmer myself and can easily write something to check their web pages for trails of them modifying htacess.. Managing htaccess isn't really my main concern. Also my target audience is probably guild websites for games such as World of Warcraft if that helps.

I like it. You MAY have to up the bandwidth a bit. I'm curious, though. What do you mean by limited tech support?

Try to offer them some kind of database, also. Guilds need membership support.

O yeah I just forgot to mention the database... Would this be a little more reasonable?

50-75mb of space (Depending on how much the reseller account has)
10-15Gb of bandwidth (Depending on how much the reseller account has)
2 Email accounts
2 Sub Domains
2 Ftp Accounts
1 Mysql Database
Limited Tech Support
Fantastico


And by limited tech support, I mean the response times wont be quite as fast and will have less priority compared to paid, the term "Limited Tech Support" i guess would generally just be used as more of a reason to upgrade to the paid accounts. They also won't include "Video Support" like the paid host provides, the video support is where the Support Team will make a video of them actually doing it to give the user a better understanding of whats going on.

Basically if i can get 1 - 2 people to signup because of the free service its paying for itself.. but I don't know if people actually upgrade from things like this, i know geocities offers free and then you can upgrade to remove the ads (which is basically what I would be doing)

that sounds a lot more reasonable. you dont even need to bump up the sub domains or email accounts. it's not a bad touch, though.

just curious, do you offer cPanel with it?

i think people will upgrade in time. the only reason a lot of people dont upgrade with free sites like geocities is because a lot of people host sites that dont need upgrading. guilds usually need upgrading, eventually.

also, take the pricing out of your sig. the admins will erase your sig for that.

also, take the pricing out of your sig. the admins will erase your sig for that.

Haha yeah I got a message from an admin this morning... I thought I had read the forum guidelines but maybe it was for another forum, it should be fixed now :)

And yes, they would offer cpanel, I don't like plesk very much and haven't really tried any others.

If you offer free hosting, do NOT offer an email account with it or you'll attract spammers.

--Tina

I think many people think free hosting is always done by bad hosts in a sense of bad support and uptime. I know it's probably wrong, but thats the way I've seen people look at it. Also, the ads normally generate little income. However, maybe for the nice market of clans it might work...

It seems someone is in my head (Guild Hosting). I'm actually in the motions of implementing my DKP hosting service which creates sub-domains on my Warcraft branded domain names.
Although I have decided to implement the branding through Apache rather than htaccess (to prevent issues)

I think this is a very good , idea and i may considor :p .

Yeah i found a reseller for about $8/mo, $12/mo with a IP, I'm sure the quality of the servers aren't so great and the sites may be slow... but since its being offered for free I'm not really worried about server quality... I will just make sure it specifies that the paid servers are much better.

Yeah i found a reseller for about $8/mo, $12/mo with a IP

How much space and bandwidth are you looking at getting?

I'm actually loading mod_layout onto my server this evening for a couple of sites.

I dont think that you should expect an $8 account to be able to run multiple websites to the extent of them making more than that $8 in banner revenue....

I got a 60GB space / 600GB bandwidth plan... I'm sure its over selling, but i told them what i wanted to do and they agreed to host it, and the point of free hosting isn't just for the ads, in fact most of the ads will probably be back to my site, maybe a few adsense ads here and there... I'm using the free service to promote my service, not to make money off advertisements alone

Another thing to think about, if your free service is slow and has moderate downtime, don't expect people to upgrade to your paid solutions. Perception is reality and people's perception will be your service is slow and bad and who would pay for that?

It also gives me the option to say my paid plans are x% faster... and the uptime is still 99.9% supposedly.

It also gives me the option to say my paid plans are x% faster... and the uptime is still 99.9% supposedly.

That's like a cookie company giving out free samples of batches that they accidentally burnt...and then trying to convince people that if they buy a bag of their cookies, they're MUCH better.

Your logic seems a bit flawed. :D

--Tina

lol you do have a point... and you had to bring up cookies... now my stomach is growling lol. I don't even really know if there will be a noticeable difference... but i see server speed as the same as more bandwidth or space, with a paid account you get more..

I don't know about other people, but I know personally features make me want it more, just like a computer with a 500gb hard drive and SATA1.5/3 vs IDE with a celeron vs a xeon processor.. The celeron will do for regular word processing and basic use... but the faster it is.. the better :) and you pay more for that..

I have thought about purchasing a reseller plan from a company that is around $8/mo and offering a free hosting service (ad based) for customers. Of course it won't be on the same server as the paid accounts because that can bog things down. I was thinking along the lines of maybe

50mb of space
5Gb of bandwidth
1 Email account
3 Sub Domains
1 Ftp Account
Limited Tech Support

The only catch would be that every page will have a advertisement on it, probably a banner at the top promoting my hosting company. I was wondering what people think about offering free hosting to promote paid hosting and if this method actually works.


The way i would place the advertisements on their site is by modifying their .htaccess files to append & prepend a php file to all of their pages, giving me control of their content. the htaccess fille will also force .html files to be parsed by php. Any accounts that modify these files will instantly be terminated. Thoughts?

I've been in the Web hosting business for over three years now, and in free hosting for 2. From experience, I can tell you your plan is no good (users want more than that), and as I've already seen stated - putting ads on user sites just won't do. That's not the way free hosting is done anymore. Unfortunately, it is now a lot harder to make money with free Web hosting. Luckily, if your goal is to gain users for your paid hosting, I think by just removing the ads you might be able to accomplish this.