[Xoopiter-Jeff]

Hi,

I have been inspired to try my hand at free hosting after an offer to buy a free hosting company. I decided to start from scratch instead of buy it. Does any one have any tips? I am using 1 server just for free accounts (2.4 celeron but should do the job) and am using xPanel. I will be using a top or bottom ad head with either banners or google ads. Which type of ads do you guys run?

Any tips would be great.

Thanks
Jeff

[Pricyber]

- Use separate servers from free and paid clients (which you are doing).
- Revise your current Terms of Service and Usage Policy. You may want to make separate agreements and policies for each to avoid confusion.
- Decide on your "market" before hand. Meaninng, ask yourself what type of sites you'd like to host for free and what sites not to host for free. There are a number of factors I use to decide who gets free hosting:

1. Does the site use tons of storage and bandwidth? If so, would it be worth hosting it for free?
2. Do you want to host sites that are already established for a certain period of time or just allow anyone without a site to signup and begin their foray?
3. Will you host sites that require lots of hardware resources?

- Also factor in if you are prepared to give full support to the clients.
- Even if you don't have to give clients support directly, are you prepared to have to maintain the server more often than with paid clients? With users getting free hosting, they tend to go hog wild and abuse resources because they have nothing to loose.
- Are you prepared for legal repucusions? Free users are pretty much anonymous, not having to give any billing information makes it harder to track them down. What if one of them decides to make death threats, small lots of email or provides illegal downloads? You get prosecuted, not them.
- How will possible negative comments from free users affect your paid hosting business? Free users don't understand that hosting is free and they get what they pay for. They shouldn't expect the most awesome support and service in the world but they do any ways. When they don't get that level of support, they will raise a holy hell war which could in turn question the level of service in your paid company.

I am sure there are others but I am running out of caffine right now and am about to fall asleep.

Personally, if I had a paid and free service, I would not let clients of either one know about the other. You could loose paid clients trying to get a free account and again, bad vibes from the free service could haunt your paid service.

[Xoopiter-Jeff]

The Free hosting is going to be totally masked from my paid. No relation what so ever. Thanks for the great tips.

Jeff

[7de5igns]

I'd run googleads as I feel they offer the best pay outcome.

[maxhest]

Sometimes google ads are the best route. What Pricyber said was very good. That is basicly what you should follow.

[Daniel]

Google Ads are very good. If you can maintain a good number of visitors it will surely pay off.

[Loon]

I think one of the biggest plagues for free hosts is people that just signup for the sake of it "OMFG!! free host offering xyz *signs up* *never uses*"

Although these people are not really a strain on resources, they don't generate any revenue either, and there are huge amounts of people that do signup to freehosts then never make use of it, or install php nuke, make one news post about how their gaming clan is "coming soon" and then disappear never to be seen again.

You should think of a good way to ensure people using your service are actually using it, and kick off the space-wasters. Mabye some sort of script that checks for the last updated date of files in the account.

People actually using what you give them to create an active website will, through their traffic generate revenue, even if it's only a little, those others will just slowly fill up your server(s) and generate nothing.

[freerackspace.org]

Make sure you have the capital to advertise the website. Also make sure you remove accounts that are not being used. I would strongly suggest that you sell your own advertising and not use google as that way you can make more money.