I'm doing some research in the free web hosting market. Basically successful and inovative free hosting can't have banner ads or any cheap spam a la Tripod, Angelfire, etc... I'm more thinking about paid addons such as more space, more bandwidth, more e-mail quota, SSL certificates, etc... But still, it doesn't add up, if you think about it. Let's say you rent a dedicated server managed by a good sysadmin. The managed server costs, say, $500/month to host a thousand low-traffic web sites. So we have a thousand users. Imagine 1% of them purchases addons amounting $10/month, that is $100 a month of sales for this server, compared to the $500 expenses Still, I think one day a company will come up with successful and wide-spread free web hosting, just like free e-mail (Gmail), free file upload, free image hosting. The problem with free web hosting is that most users don't want advertising on their web page (obviously), while this is ok for other kinds of free hosting (e-mail, file upload, image hosting...). I'm aware that there are many companies offering free web hosting, but they don't seem popular/successful. At least, at the moment, most web sites in the world are hosted on paid hosting, while most mail boxes are probably free mailboxes. What do you think about the free hosting market? How would you turn it viable/lucrative?
Most free hosting sites use paid ads. Some use text links for increased page rank. The reason most sites are hosted on paid hosting is because google does not rank free hosted sites well. They look at domain name and how long it has been around. They preffer unique domain name that has been registered for a while and is paid for years not a year or 2.
I don't think this is the reason, let alone that many people don't know about this Google ranking issue. I think many people prefer not having ads on a company web site for instance...
I don't think google ways in on if the server your own is free or not, that cant take into affect because they don't know who's paying for what and def an unfair penalty for people who may have connections. There is a Business model waiting to be created for free web hosting and someones probably going to figure it out within the next couple of years
Many use free service as a means to promote themselves and build clients. Yes, if you want to run a good one, very little ads are a must, meaning very little money... right? The trick is like you said, upgrades. And affiliations. For example, refer clients to sources like hostgator where you can get $50 for an affiliate link. Free hosting is sort of a bridge for some users until they learn what they are doing, Im guessing a good business model is to provide that bridge an end, to a reliable host. Now that can either be the sister company you are working with to provide profssional hosting( maybe another server you run under a different name) or reseller hosting or affiliate hosting like hostgator.
I think it would be cool if someone offered free hosting for like 10 megs. I mean that wouldn't be so hard and you could probably support thousands of accounts on an inexpensive server (I could be wrong?) You could upsell them with various site promotions maybe...who knows. You might just make them subscribe to your email like Bravenet did...Although I didn't like that service very much...it got annoying
I believe the company's that will be able to run free web hosting successfully will be the company's like Google and yahoo which already have other things that will back there success such as gmail, or a search engine which brings in enough revenue, Most likely the revenue will be seen indirectly through other things such as search engine hits and page views rather than directly gaining money off of providing free hosting!
Maybe to find a solution to this intricate maze is asking ourselves "How would GoogleHost work?". Ok, you're all going to respond "Adsense", but let's assume there's no ads on the GoogleHost web sites