Half-life of free web hosts

**masterbo** · August 17th, 2012, 11:16

Originally Posted by sander k

I have had a free host (free100mbhost.com) for 2 years after that I sold the site and its clients to an other webhosting company (prosoftstudio.com) which quit the free hosting after about a year. Now a days they aren't even a webhost any more.

Selling one's business isn't an easy thing. I have once sold a blog of mine - I was in a bad health state and simply couldn't handle all the tasks I had.

Now I see as the blog is falling into decay and kind of feel pity I haven't just offered it to a decent person who wouldn't use it for SEO tricks and throw away afterwards.

**sander k** · August 17th, 2012, 11:26

Its a shame as it is happening a lot. I even had a PR3 proxy sites once, the guy bought it for $5000 and 2 months later it was gone.
He put way to many ads on it and it died in no time.

**TaoPhoenix** · August 18th, 2012, 02:56

Originally Posted by Seraphim

Probably the one that came as most surprising was Oniscorp, which was in fact a host that was being run as a class project by a student- and closed when the assignment was completed.

Technical question to Seraphim, though it bears relevance in this thead topic:

Seraphim, the student I know of was HostMyThing (and previous incarnations). Oniscorp was (some manager?) fronting DoNotGetCaughtWithoutOne, and later Hostalope. However I lost track of the latter, so if you heard he was *also* a student, let me know. But either way, Hostalope was gone by the second year too, and the main reason he attracted my attention was that Oniscorp (later determined as a manager, he kept saying he could not do X without the Owner's approval) applied but then tried to impose his own aggressive demands in my project.

**TaoPhoenix** · August 18th, 2012, 02:59

Originally Posted by masterbo

...They would never ' look into a mouth of a gift horse' or post dirty comments if the site is down for some minutes and I haven't yet posted status message explaining why.

In an interesting contrast, I let (almost) anyone join who wanted to be in. But then for the downtime I used a type of graded rating system so that no one 15 minute outage would nuke any entrant, it took a few multi-day outages in a row plus no response to finally flunk out.

**Seraphim** · August 18th, 2012, 18:58

Originally Posted by TaoPhoenix

Technical question to Seraphim, though it bears relevance in this thead topic:

Seraphim, the student I know of was HostMyThing (and previous incarnations). Oniscorp was (some manager?) fronting DoNotGetCaughtWithoutOne, and later Hostalope. However I lost track of the latter, so if you heard he was *also* a student, let me know. But either way, Hostalope was gone by the second year too, and the main reason he attracted my attention was that Oniscorp (later determined as a manager, he kept saying he could not do X without the Owner's approval) applied but then tried to impose his own aggressive demands in my project.

Ah. I only knew of one student project that got exposed, and just got the names mixed up. But it still shows that the basic hosting market is so accessible that there are a lot of setups operating without any serious long term plans or sustainable financial backing.

**wswd** · August 18th, 2012, 19:35

I'm still wondering if he actually was a student, or if that was simply a cover up for the grossly failed business. I'm not 100% convinced that I believe the guy, to be honest.

**TaoPhoenix** · August 18th, 2012, 22:21

Originally Posted by wswd

I'm still wondering if he actually was a student, or if that was simply a cover up for the grossly failed business. I'm not 100% convinced that I believe the guy, to be honest.

There was plenty of doubt here too, though it was one of the more unusual reasons given for a failed host. I was pretty upset because I thought conceptually he had the next innovation in hosting, which was owner-assistance installing web apps which I for example know nothing about. He got a 1% sliver of luck that I hadn't gotten serious using my apps, because then I would have been livid when he folded. In a way that's why I do old school upload posting, so that no host failing can really take me down.

**binil** · August 19th, 2012, 22:29

As many of you pointed out - there are a lot of abusers of the system. Some time ago I had my account suspended by resellerclub(directi) because I didn't look into one of my users who was hosting illegal stuff. They thought I am the culprit (Well I am responsible for the content in my hosting) and it took some convincing to let them give back my domain.

But I really hope to continue to provide free hosting for a long time to come - there are a few genuine guys who really want this to know about hosting.

**Sitebee** · August 22nd, 2012, 16:45

I ran Stonerocket for 6 years, which I recently sold. My life is just to busy to dedicate all those hours in running a free hosting provider anymore.

Maybe one day i`ll start another free host provider.

**P2HW - Rich** · August 26th, 2012, 21:11

I agree with the guys before saying the abusers really kill it. I was the community manager of Post2Host World before I revived it a few days ago, and the abusers were hosting things like russian porn, CPU-intensive scripts, nulled scripts, the whole nine yards.

The other reason "free" hosts close is because they aren't making a huge income from it. That's why Post2Host World died in the first place and many free hosts die.