Free Hosting - What does it for you?

Hey Everyone,

I am looking to set up my free hosting website soon, But what will attract people like yourself but probably less experienced to sign up and use my free host?

What would make you sign up with one free host over another?

I already have a great and clean design which can be seen in many different languages, and there will be no forced ads on customers websites.

Thanks

Jon

 

Er, high levels of resources, Fantastico, WHM, an IP address, good customer support.

Take your pick. May I ask how you'll fund this?

 

People mostly look for high levels of resources and great customer support.

You also should always have Fantastico, as there will be many people requesting it.

 

Good servers, good amount of space, bandwidth, and UPTIME.

 

uptime and seriosity , more than 1 year in the hosting business, good reviwes , good and fast support when needed

 

Who is your target market? Are you making free hosting like geocities? or free hosting like googlepages with their own domains?

And how are you going to make money?

People like free hosting because they're free. People don't like free hosting because they get what they pay for. So people with slightly more money than their 2 cents will get a cheap shared hosting for their personal sites.

 

For me it's no forced ads, cpanel and a longer expiration period.

 

I would like to have an account if it support .asp,besides,stable,no forced ads,CP.

 

Uptime... which might not happen since it's free host. Nevertheless, good luck with it.

 

Actually uptime, service and mainly ads (are they on or not) I guess.
Check out LayeredPanel.com - really is the best in the market (see sites like 110mb.com and Zymic.com using their soft).

 

it is pain to have free hosts.many people abusing free hosts.my host got complained for Trojan my registerer suspended my site(10000 users) i lost many $ for this site.

 

True - it requires some stamina.
You need to register the domain with a place that don't care about that (example: openprovider.nl) and then you got peace of mind.

Systems like LP had auto bots that scan all sites for abusers and mail the owner on any suspicious user immediately.

 

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for all the great feedback, as I said before the website will not have any forced ads on the customers webpages, I am thinking of using LP so there will also be a full control panel, I will also try to incorporate a FTP and Fantastico

Is there any more thoughts?

Thanks

Jon

 

LP has a built in install system which is similar to Fantasico and FTP is already incorporated so I think you are covered.

 

Weird people here; 'what do you want from a free host?' 'more things than 99% of the paid hosts in the world provide'.

Right... For free...

There are two kinds imho (read my sig too ;

1) stable / little features
2) instable / bunches of features

and by stable/instable i mean uptime.

In my opinion and experience 2) is used for short term spamming, abuse and other misery. 1) usually attracts more solid folk and runs longer.

my 2 cents

 

Thanks for the information guys, Kwaku, I have read your sig many times and If I am honest I have been following the steps you set out

 

Thanks! If you would take kind advise and want to make something serious of freehosting, choose for stability and uptime. The posters in this thread/forum don't actually use freehosting for their sites; people who do go for stability. Not features. Simply put; most of all sites are written in PHP these days (for the past 5-8 years already, after perl cgi in the 'beginning' of the net), so why offer stacks and stacks of asp.net, cfm, perl, blablabla when most people don't need that. It comprises the security and stability of your servers.

Why do you think the *huge* hosters on earth; freewebs.com, 110mb.com, geocities.com etc don't offer those enormous bulk of features? Simply put, to do so, you need;

- more support
- more admins
- in short; more $

Not sustainable as a free host.

And if you offer everything as freehost and no ads on user pages, what are your users going to upgrade to and make you money?

The large hosts I mentioned can exist for a reason; they give you nice service (some of them have much better support than paid hosting) and stability beyond what you expect from a free host. That is what 99% of users seek for, not a billion features; who needs all those ... 1%

Regards!

 

Or, simply put; if you are going to give everything away for free, how will you make money? Either you need to entice people to;

- buy away ads
- buy stability buy upgrading (moving to another host)
- buy features

'nuff said; you cannot host on $0.

 

I am expecting to make money by selling the upgrades to payed hosting, so by referalls. I might put a system in place where there are forced ads for a time period, say 6 months, if you dont want them for the 6 months then you can pay to have them removed.

Thanks for the advise

Jon