Rules on Limited Time Free Offers

[theraptor]

FWS needs to have some rules on offers posted in the free space that are limited time. Are these actually free hosting, or just paid hosting with a trial period?

[Dan]

What do you mean?

[Jan]

If you see any, report them please.

[theraptor]

What do you mean?

I have noticed more and more offers and replies torequests for free webhosting that are not actually free. You get free hosting for x amount of days and then you do a review and get free hosting for x more days, but then you have to go paid.

Example of one such post:

I can offer you a review package hosting from www.removed.com - where you submit a review of our services after 30 days of your site being active.

Once you review our services, you will get an additional 60 days of service for free. So it's about a free 3 months of hosting in exchange for a review of a few sentences at the end of your first month.

Then you can either move on to another host OR switch over to our paid plan which starts at just $1.49/mo

We are trying to get reviews for our testimonials page and we would rather have people with experience do it. We'll be able to give you 250mb space and 2.5gb bandwidth.

let me know if you are interested, I have to give you an order link, it's a private order link as well

Regards

[Dan]

Oh I see.
Yeah report the ones you see and we'll kick their asses.

[TaoPhoenix]

FWS needs to have some rules on offers posted in the free space that are limited time. Are these actually free hosting, or just paid hosting with a trial period?

This is the one I caught on to. (At least they were up front about it.)

http://www.freewebspace.net/forums/s....php?t=2217269

Q: What happens after 6 months period ?
A: you have 3 options ....
1- Turn into paid for only (1$/mo)
2- Request to continue for some Ads.
3- Your account will be terminated

When I asked, thread starter responded:

Check second option !!

Yes it's "still free" but to give people a lenient service and then replace it with something restrictive is still the theme of this discussion. Those ads at that future date could be unbearable - we can't know. It's still a data-relocation risk to the signee after these 6 months.

I could live with it if there was a special category all its own for Temporary/Host Experiments because then people wouldn't put their frontline stuff up. It would be more like a cousin of RateMe - "rate my webservice".