Well I want to start a website offering free hosting, subdomains only and was curious as to what your guys thoughts were, think it would be a profitable venture? Just curious about your guys thoughts. already have a domain picked out as well fh4you [dot] com will be the sites url when i do decide to develop. thanks, Brett
no! whatever you do, don't do this. the free hosting sites all start off great then end up in a chaotic mess. even if you manage to satisfy your customers - unlikely - they will leave you when they get a domain. there are other, much better ways to make money from hosting. pm me if you want some ideas.
I think if you manage your resources well, have some adverts on the sites. Do not offer huge packages but reasonable few hundred mb just keep the small advertising link. 1. Earn through forum posting, meaning those using free hosting can opt for the advertising link or forum posting. 2. If you do not want to put ads on users pages, can put at the controlpanel, but restrict email to web based. Put ads in the web based email page. 3. Use the free hosting as a launching vehicle, each page have a small backlink back to your main site. This can increase your back links and make your main site much more popular for selling of adverts or links. But free web hosting is no easy work, too many scammers and phishers around. Problem with phishers is ISPs tends to be very strict and may cut off your connection until you have this resolved.
Again totally agreed with monosodium! Free hosting makes huge mess... Better make it cheap not free (i guess) And I actually don't like the sites look... It's nothing unique... all other hosts has same
the sites look, well it is not even designed or uploaded yet, so i am not sure where you are getting this look from. secondly I do not have to have massive support for this site, it is pretty straight forward, and I have run one before so it is nothing extremely new to me. brett.
If you can manage the hosted sites efficiently then you will make a profit else it can turn into a mess. Will require a lot of work, IMO.
I couldn't agree more. Don't do it. You won't be able to handle all the support and manage everyone's needs when the site gets bigger, and like monosodium said, it'll be a chaotic mess and just not worth it at all.
chose to not do it at this current time, working on a different project or two now. thanks for the help guys.