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Free Hosting - What is your plan?

LFoi

New Member
Hi there,

I was thinking about launching a free hosting service, but I am not sure what a real plan would be as there are so many issues making it look impossible to seriously developing some nice system.

There are many issues which make me believe it simply doesnt pay to launch a free hosting site.

1.) Abusers
There are people (a lot) who simply love to abuse free hosting services. Either they use a service to spam, to host high traffic porn sites, hotlink pictures on adult sites and forums and so on...

2.) Security
Of course you could just block a few php functions and disable perl but that's not really an option because "you suck" if you limit functions (Users are like that and expect all PHP functions to work if you offer PHP)

3.) Other security issues
Sure there are great controlpanels like CPanel, DirectAdmin and many others but they all lack in one way or another. While CPanel is one of the most secure ones (due the 3rd party scripts) there are still security issues left (especially if you disable a few functions controlpanels need to operate).

That said, it is still impossible to build a rock solid system if you want to offer PHP or Perl support to your users.

4.) MySQL Features
MySQL is a great database to use but it can also create a lot of issues like locked tables, too many connections (even with multi server setups) and people who don't think about others and setup a p2p forum or some porn forum with thousands of online users at once. Sure you can forbid large forums - but you will "suck again". I don't even want to start about buggy scripts, creating thousands of queries at once, stealing most resources for one users page.

Sure you could kick such users, but they come back like flies.

5.) Post to Host Method
You could ask people to make 10 posts to get hosting, but it doesnt help. Abusers will just play nice, and once they have hosting they don't care anymore. There are also many users who simply don't want to post so that's not a perfect method too.

6.) Making Money
Nobody does anything for free - everybody is looking to at leeast getting their money back (server fees etc). That said, you will have to show ads on your site or on the users page.

Users generally don't want ads on their site (you suck yet again). They also don't want to post on your forums (where you could place ads) except they have issues and need help. That said, you wont make any money with forum ads - at least not the money you pay for one or two servers.

You could offer a web based upload to fix that problem (showing ads on teh web ftp manager) but yet again - you suck, cause you don't offer FTP and "it takes too long"..

All that said, where is the point in offering free hosting to people? I am sure some people just do it to sell their service to someone else once there are enough members - but seriously... if you just want to provide a great and stable service (RELIABLE FREE HOSTING) you are... "fked" - excuse my english :)

Ok this post is long enough so let's get to the point:

What am I missing?
If you read all the stuff above you will see: there is no real point to launch such a service if you just want to provide "the best" service. The only reason someone could have is selling his/her service after a while for a few K - but if you are like me and you just want to offer people something reliable... you lose.

In case you are a free host:
What do you think about all these issues and how do you handle it if you are not one of the hosts who just want to create sites to sell them later :)

Thanks for your time :)
 
I generally hate post to host for the following reasons

* Too much effort

I want the hostees to concentrate on making their sites better, not on trying to keep their hosting. When they grow, I grow too!

* It's Crap

Seriously, post to host encourages people to post nonsense just to make the required post count. It cheapens the forums actually and, more often than not, it ends up looking really cheap
 
honestly, post2host site has the most spam post...been there see that thousand of time...but still most will do nothing as what to do when you need money for ads to survive...
 
wacky_lokpo said:
I generally hate post to host for the following reasons

* Too much effort

I want the hostees to concentrate on making their sites better, not on trying to keep their hosting. When they grow, I grow too!

* It's Crap

Seriously, post to host encourages people to post nonsense just to make the required post count. It cheapens the forums actually and, more often than not, it ends up looking really cheap

No, sometimes "post to host" is sometimes a good idea. What if the requestee doesn't want to put up ads. You give them an alternative option. You give them the choice to post weekly/monthly/semiyearly/yearly, etc. And they have to keep that post count up. It builds up their forum community, advertises their webhosting company alot better, and still gives what the requestee wants. And this could be vice-versa. Sometimes requestee's dont' want to post, so they rather put up ads. You should always give your clients more then one option for free hosting, etc.
 
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