Free hosting sites like http://www.filefront.com/ which allow free hosting of content, files, images etc What are the costs involved? Clearly the hosting will be main cost. Also some marketing/ promotional cost but I would imagine most of the traffic would be viral or word of mouth The script can be a standard template either free or bought for low price What about revenue? PPC like adsense, PPA affiliate programs, banners and links Anyone with experience care to share please.
I run free web hosting, file hosting, video hosting and image hosting. Free web hosting and free image hosting are making me money. File hosting are not. Thing with free file hosting is that the ones that make a lot of $ make money are hosting 99% illegal stuff (rapidshare being a good example); mere mortals like us cannot do that as you will get complaints, DMCA stuff etc and your provider or one (or more) of the upper level providers will block/switch you off. So I have to remove the illegal stuff making my file host not very popular Same goes for videos. Sure I can host in countries where they dont' care about this kind of thing, but there bandwidth is very expensive, so then it would need a huge upfront investment. But web + image hosting do well for me. Especially free web hosting. I am currently writing an ebook on blackhat free web hosting; it is one of those things that really work and never really gets saturated.
ive heard that free forum hosting can be lucrative, especially if you have a good support forum with revenue sharing
The cost of maintain this kind of site is quite high as you need to buy a powerful server not counting the cost of maintainence and marketing budget spending. For the revenue part,you don't need to overcrowd your site with banner ads and affiliate link,you need only attract a few high end paying advertiser to advertise at your site such as game developer etc