Ok, Someone explain to me what the purpose of starting a free web hosting service is for or a free crm. Is it to get you in free for the minimum and then up sale you when your business grows? Take for example this website... http://666mb.com By the way I am in no way associated with this site...
A free web hosting services place advertisement and banners on your site without your approval.. it's how they earn money..
So many businesses are based on the 'free' model these days. Chris Anderson wrote a fantastic book called Free and after reading that you'll definitely always be looking for the angle when someone tells you something is free. What you must remember is that even if what you are being offered is 'free' you are still always paying with 2 things.. Your email address, which is valuable to any business owner.. And your time.
It is free, but it requires them advertising on your site usually .. which obviously creates revenue for them
give away something for free.. then sell ad space.. or upsale paid service as you said.. very common practice .. search freemium and you will know what I mean
Normally they offer paid upgrade options, or sell advertising (sometimes just on their own page, not yours). A few people do it just because, and rely on donations.
In the past they used to throttle your bandwidth and redirect some of your traffic to their ad site. I don't know if they are still doing that but I don't see any good reason to give a way free hosting.
There are plenty of reasons to give away free hosting (as in that it is fully functional, and has no host forced adds).
Free is a marketing concept to get you to read the advertorial. If you read it, then fine, it has done it's job. So you get some discount or add-on. But there is "no such thing as a free lunch" Cheers, Brendan
Useually Free means free, it depends, most business get something out of it when they offer you something for free
As they say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. You'll find that there are almost always strings attached either in the form of ads splattered all over your site or the host suspending your account without notice and asking you to pay a regular fee in order to get it unsuspended.
I tell you what since I run a true free hosting for gamers project and when you offer cpanel directly free to users you will find yourself owning several servers with plenty of activity but using your day job to fund the entire operation for 2 years while you get big as hell to sell or figure out a sustainable solution by that point.