i dont understand how people can offer free hosting without banners or ads and make money. Am i missing something here? Or are they just doing it to gain customers recommendations?
There are many reasons. The idea is that you offer a limited free service and some of those users sign up for a paid account. It's like a try before you buy. Hosting is a minefield and there is a lot of trust and recommendations that go towards tempting people to use a particular service.
May be do this to get some links to their home page, or basically they want to advertise their main site or products
A lot of people instead of doing ads or banners make the user post on a forum. By doing this, they can eventually sell advertising on the "active" forum.
yep thats what i was going to say offer freeservice-theyfind you-you take offer-you dont like limits-you go to paid hosting im lucky tho i can restist free and paid heheh
They usually have upgrade options that cost money. And they probably just affiliate with a real hosting company.
When it come to hosting biz it doesn't count money alone. There are many way a free hosting can make money such as 1.Force member to post such as 1 post/day at their forum 2.When free user overgrown their hosting then they will upgrade to paid hosting 3.To get good reputation before offering paid hosting
I started out as a free hosting service, too many problems and the profit was not worth the trouble. I then changed it and became a standard cpanel host. Around 600-800 of my free hosting users signed up during the following week. I offered them to download theire old free hosted website for free, or they could signup for cpanel and I transfer the website for them (which was realy easy). Offering good and fast support for your free hosting is what makes people signup for payed plans. It was not my plan to do this from start, but turned out nice