One Time Pay Hosting

[Meksilon]

It's actually quite possible (as I showed in another thread). Of course, it's not going to last "forever" but most people will be gone after a few years. It's not sustainable forever, but is for quite some time. Also depends on how much the one-time fee is.

Actually, you showed it in this thread.

Look at it another way. You're looking at it as if the host has to be a "Free host", whereas perhaps they only allocate a small ammount of their resources to free hosting, and the rest to paid clients. In this model of hosting if "free hosting" is sustainable, which it can be, so to can one-time-fee hosting with the advantage that clients that accept a 1-time fee are more likely to spend money on the "optional addons" you offer them. Once your free clients are using too much resources, they either leave your service (freeing up the resources) or migrate to a paid package.

[wswd]

It actually can't work. You have limited resources with potentially limitless spending. Free hosting isn't sustainable either unless you have P2H or ads, both of which make ongoing money. With one-time payments, there is no ongoing funding. You can certainly sustain service for quite some time, but you simply can't sustain it forever. At some point, the host is going to fold, due to lack of funding. It doesn't really matter how many people leave, as you still have fixed costs, and why would somebody migrate to another paid package, when they already paid you? There should be no reason for them to migrate to another package. That kinda defeats the purpose of a one-time fee.

[WO Mark]

What happens if and when your sales start slowing down, and the packages you are offering increase to try and get more people in - thus in the end members would no longer have the need to upgrade to a higher paid package?

It won't work unfortunately.

[Meksilon]

What happens if and when your sales start slowing down

Simple, you limit the number of free hosting accounts that can be created to account for the amount of space and b/w you can allocate to them on the servers. Look at it this way, I have a number of customers who get a 50% discount where I work. Now is that sustainable if everyone got it? Absolutely not, the business would be running a loss! But if something like less than 0.5% of sales are "50% off" then it's fine.

[zanode]

I would never join one of these hosts for obvious reasons.

[Daniel27]

One time payment and get hosted for ever sounds to to good to be true .

[francisuk22]

To me it depends if they are a known company like fasthosts, 1&1, leaseweb, rapidswitch, rackserv softlayer etc.and how long they been in business for.

If ever they go bust they should email you and i would personally ask for a refund of how many mouths you got left etc.

whatever you do, do you homework first never enter into a contract

[1paket]

Much depends on the host itself IMHO.