Paid or free?

[Darknight]

Over the 5 - 6 years iv been on the internet I have found this:
Free hosts can be just as good or better than some paid services.
At the same time in other ways price does really matter in other cases no!
I have found service to be truly crap in 80% of hosting services paid or not cheap or not.

I will not post the crap hosts
However out of 10
I found 1 good
bittraffic.com a small but reliable host.
It seems these smaller hosts really care more than these bigger hosts

I have a msg for these hosts paid or free if you cant provide good service and care for your clients leave the hosting game and do something usefull for the community instead of sitting there making all of us look bad
</rant>
The reason I started hosting was really just to host my stuff without all the crap but then i decided to fight back and also hjost others without all the crap another thing I will NEVER do is get a 3rd party support team
I mean that is not only foolish but very stupid to think a 3rd party support team can and will provide as good support as you/your partners can!
I will if i ever get big give people shares in the hosting if they have 5% of shares they do 5% of the work etc this way you may not make as much but you sure as hell prvoide better services

Finaly anyone in this game to really make a differnce and care I wish you good luck and hope you kick these uncaring hosts ---'s :P

[TheHostHunter]

You might want to think about how you distribute shares for your company, someone might work hard(51% of the work) for a couple of weeks, but then get bored and suddenly have 51% of the shares and are only doing 5% of the work.

I hear the sounds of opportunity to create a solid 3rd party support business ;)

[Michbakk]

I think that paid hosting is good for commercial sites. If you are going to host you own site you may go with free hosting.

[goblin77]

You know the gold rule of hosting - you get what you pay for. So you may have your own home page on the free hosting but if your business is serious and bringing money in this case you have tyo pay for it IMHO.

[Decker]

All good points of view, remember a few things though.
Paid or free, it's not a hobby or 'after school' (no offence to some who actually do this with great effort and provide great service to their market) occupation.
Again either, if you offer you need to be there when things go wrong (preferably notice before your customers do).
And again, it does come down to money, unless you have loads to lose, it has to make a profit (or at least break even).
3rd party support is a bit of a grey area, does that mean not in one office or not actually your company and subcontracted out? If you have good staff 'on your books' not just anonymous for $50/month we'll answer questions, then you have gold as long as they care.
This is from experience too, many years and people who actually cared about those hosted, and did more than their share most times well outside the usual requirements. They learned on their own to answer questions and see to faults that they didn't know about and did that in advance too.

Giving shares was a way I considered, but even though it was offered they refused, they were happy with the way it ran. No one got bollocked for mistakes, I took all that, any good bits they shared in, feeling like they belonged (I know an old one) was enough and it was not so much a boss & staff it was a community of friends that provided a service.

God can I go on when I start :D - if your hosting and get the folks that admin'd and helped me then your blessed.

[fcolor]

It is not appropriate to compare free hosts with paid ones. Free host do not provide support in general. Thsoe are just diferent businesses.

[Decker]

It is not appropriate to compare free hosts with paid ones. Free host do not provide support in general. Thsoe are just diferent businesses.

I agree it might not be a fair comparison, but the second part
Free host do not provide support in general is not correct, some provide better support than some with high cost paid packages.

[amz]

It is not appropriate to compare free hosts with paid ones. Free host do not provide support in general. Thsoe are just diferent businesses.
Speak for yourself! We provider extensive, prompt, knowledgeable support
to all of our clients irregardless whether they are on free or paid accounts.

The main primary difference that sets our free plans apart from our paid plans
is that those on free hosting accounts cannot use their accounts for
business or kind of "for profit" purposes.

[Dan]

Speak for yourself! We provider extensive, prompt, knowledgeable support
to all of our clients irregardless whether they are on free or paid accounts.

The main primary difference that sets our free plans apart from our paid plans
is that those on free hosting accounts cannot use their accounts for
business or kind of "for profit" purposes.

I agree 100% with you amz.
I used to provide free hosting only and offered the users very good support and packages, which is why we always used the phrase, "Free Premium-Style Hosting".

[Fear101]

i think that sometimes it is good to pay for a website because you can start a big blog or a big community of people and on the other hand you can do that for free

[Darknight]

Oh ----
I totaly forgot about this post lol
I dont really know why I made the topic free or paid
I was trying to prove a point that sometimes with places like mydomain.com etc a free host like amz would be a better place to be lol...

Just becuse you pay dont mean your going to get good service
This really needs to change within the hosting company's.
Witch is why I wish all that are, good luck and lots of it.

Becuse if you provide good service and good servers you deserve what you get and much more!
Also dont try and fight with all the n00b hosts by offering lower deals than them just sit back and watch them go bankrupt/close and leave all there greedy clients for dead
Think of this,

Do you really want to be hosting people that dont care about you if you go under and will just winge on places like this becuse there "hosting service" went bankrupt.

I have a few words for you people that are getting payed/free hosting
If you dont want to support your host by paying them proper money for your service dont come here and winge about it when they go bankrupt thats your issue.

alot of the time you guys expect way to much

Please remember this when you find a good host! And reward them with atleast a good comment.

If not donate to help them out abit more we have base prices yes..
But when you think about it alot of these small hosts arnt making much money and doing 5 - 6 hour days..
the bigger hosts are doing 12 hour days
You need to show respect for the hosting services if you expect respect back.
Alot of you think that we should help you on every little issue when half the time its not even something that comes with the package
You get cut when we dont and you never say thankyou when we do well very few.


And Fear101,
Iv seen you around posting abit
So welcome to FWS :)

[arizonadream]

The main primary difference that sets our free plans apart from our paid plans
is that those on free hosting accounts cannot use their accounts for
business or kind of "for profit" purposes.

Can you explain why can't they use for "profit" purposes? Because of instability of servers? or what?

[Decker]

Can you explain why can't they use for "profit" purposes? Because of instability of servers? or what?

I think it would be easy to guess - if your gonna make cash out of it pay for it!

[Fahrenheit]

I think that you should divide your projects. Some of them host with free hosting (home pages, hobies etc), but some project host with paid hosting (business projects).

[Darknight]

Can you explain why can't they use for "profit" purposes? Because of instability of servers? or what?

This is what Im talking about
People like you, as decker said
If your going to make money pay for it...
Theres nothing unstable about cybertoads its simpley the fact that you dont deserve to make money out of soemthing there paying for!

THEY DO IT AD FREE THEY DO IT WITHOUT ANY POSTS IN FORUMS
Why should they sponcer you to make money and you just cost them money...?

People like you deserve mydomain.com... :)
And posts like this is what has gave me a -rep :D
If any of you have noticed im far to open to have my hosting co in the sig... lol


I think that you should divide your projects. Some of them host with free hosting (home pages, hobies etc), but some project host with paid hosting (business projects).
I have no idea what you mean by this please explain futher.
If you mean free is for personal paid is for profit then yea...

[AMC]

i Have certaily noticed that if you find the right company, free hosting can be better than paid. I would suggest that the best way to find a free host is to look at when they were created, if it was a month ago, wait abit, but if it was 2 years ago, you can probably trust them.

If you can trust them then yeah, free is good, but then again if you make it (which most of us plan to do i would imagine) you are going to have to pay for your site.

[amz]

Can you explain why can't they use for "profit" purposes? Because of instability of servers? or what?
This is not exactly rocket science, Einstein!

Why go with paid if you can do everything with your free account?

If we don't make some sort of incentive for people to go with a paid hosting
plan then everyone on the planet would just simply signup for free hosting
plans and be perfectly content with that!

You will also find common among most hosts the sentiment that if the host
is not making any money from a web site then why should the customer
be making a profit at the host's expense?

For this reason, we have a divide between personal hosting and business
hosting and anything that could be seen as any profit making activity or
service would disqualify you for free hosting and you would need to purchase
a paid hosting plan for those uses.

[AMC]

Yeah, Thats seems fair enough, the ethics of earning money off someone elses cash are a bit much