Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Reseller Hosting : Not Allowed To Offer Free Accounts?

[Dean Saliba]

I opened up a reseller account with Heart and after almost a week all seems to be going well.

The problem is I wanted to offer some "free" accounts to people who wanted to host personal pages and stuff.

I contacted Heart's customer service to enquire how I would go about putting a small banner" on these pages like they do over at Angelfire or Geocities.

They replied that I was not allowed to offer free hosting of anykind on any of their servers.

I read over their Terms and could not find anything in there that related to offering free webhosting accounts. Yet on their website they are themselves giving away free webhosting accounts.

heartinternet.co.uk/freewebhosting.shtml

Do all companies have this rule?

[CyberHostPro]

HI

most companies do have this rule to prevent fraud and spammers

[The Stealthy One]

Dean Saliba,

If you're interested in starting a free hosting company, I can hook you up with one of my friends who is doing quite well with one now (making $x,xxx.xx per month), and is a mod over at FreeWHT. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll pm you his username.

[clanosiris]

Hi,

Free hosting is always an issue with fraud, phishing, and hacking!

In fact if you were to get a subpoena by the FBI and there is no validation of the contact your basically unable to help them.

It is quite a HUGE issue on a shared environment as many free hosting script just create accounts up to 1000+ accounts within 30 days. But 90% of the account are unused which makes the panel slow down due to too many domains active.

I suggest acquiring a VPS for this venture and work your way to dedicated server.

[Swelly]

You also may want to check out http://www.freewht.com aswell. You may be able to find better insight there.

[zalutao]

I'm remember 1-2 years ago on resellerzoom on same server where i was hosted there was some reseller that ofered free accounts and (RZ support told us) he had around 2 000 acounts, and made a lot of problems to other users, high load, oftem spamcop problems so they added in their AUP that free hosting is forbiden...

[Swelly]

I agree that offering a free web hosting account will attract the spam, the fraud and overall level of service on the machine. However, just for knowning....how do free web hosting companies do it?

[zalutao]

Never thinking about it but probably making a lot of restrictions on mail servers (some quotas for sent mails, per hour, day etc..) But in any case i'm shure that is not easy to deal with that.

[The Stealthy One]

How do we do it? Ads. They bring in more $$$ than you might think. The problem is in attracting the right clients. I would typically never advise a person to advertise in Asia, for instance....most of your problems will come from Asian IPs.

One day, I might get into free hosting again. But right now, I'm glad I'm out. It was indeed a lot of hassle!

[clanosiris]

Free hosting companies does it simply by verifying all accounts. Simply disable automated creation and check + address to make sure there is some validation.

Other than that thats how most freehost does it. Also need scripts to constantly scan for such content.