How is the market demand for free hosting > How many signups can I get per day & how?

[enoughhosting]

After lot of brain storming. I have come up with a free web hosting business model that sounds promising.

Although I did not like it at first, I will offer post2hosting free hosting without any banner ads.
4 posts per month!

Secondly for those who dont like post2host, I will offer free hosting but with banner ads on top of every page.

Now my question is how many signups can i get for my free hosting at best.
I dont want to advertise on adwords, facebook or such. At best I might do forum posting for publicity.
Like posting on this forum and similar ones.

Can I get 500 signups per day ? Can I get more ? What do I really have to do to get so much sign ups.
I dont mind getting fake signups, all i need is a lot of signups. :lol:

 

[sander k]

500 a day! Are you mad?
More like 5 to 10 if you have good plans.

SEO is your answer to that.

 

[Sitebee]

I agree with Sander K, the chances of getting 500 sign-up per day are virtually 0 on p2h and yep SEO will help.

Im also launching a free service in a few weeks, I have a niche and im good at SEO. Server is in place, got a absolute stunner of a domain. Currently working hard on lots and lots of unique content.


Work hard at it pal and you will succeed in making a popular free hosting provider, whether you can make it profitable I can`t answer for you.

 

[Seraphim]

I've been getting a steady 1-3 signups a day without any advertising at all other than posting on a few forums.

Problem is, almost all of these are bot signups and not actual users. Maybe 1 in 1000 actually uses their account, and a good half of them are spam operators searching for exploitable providers to abuse.

 

[enoughhosting]

yes, getting genuine traffic is tough with so many hosts to choose from. also post2host is a bad idea when 000webhosting is giving banner free p2h free hosting. How on earth could they afford it ? :cry2:

 

[wswd]

000webhosting is giving banner free p2h free hosting. How on earth could they afford it ? :cry2:

Ever see their reviews? They offer incredibly crappy service on terribly overloaded servers. They use the pay-to-upgrade model, which is another viable free host model. The main problem is that people looking for free hosting are usually looking for free hosting...they don't plan on paying.

 

[enoughhosting]

Ever see their reviews? They offer incredibly crappy service on terribly overloaded servers. They use the pay-to-upgrade model, which is another viable free host model. The main problem is that people looking for free hosting are usually looking for free hosting...they don't plan on paying.

Once there was a time and a place in a kingdom far far far away where people used to pay to upgrade and settle for paid hosting eventually. But I agree with you, most probably that time is long gone now. So my intentions are to stay totally free for ever. Thats how my business model has been calculated and it sounds pretty workable if people agree with me. Yes one of my goals is to offer reliable servers and good uptime just like paid hosts.

Although there is another catch for ----------, they are on top of googles free host search, so they can be anything they want to be, bcs google is throwing a huge amount of traffic for them. Hmmm...

 

[wswd]

Once there was a time and a place in a kingdom far far far away where people used to pay to upgrade and settle for paid hosting eventually.

People still do, and some will offer donations too. The problem is that most (almost all) will not. You can't usually rely on the paid upgrades to pay the server bills anymore, unfortunately.

 

[SKISLAL]

Outcome also depends on your advertisement performance in my opinion. I believe there is always a market for it.

 

[harrie]

I believe instead of free hosting, you should try and get your hands on reseller hosting from Hostgator.

at $19 per month, you can get a reseller account and then you can create different accounts for your users and very reasonable prices.

It is a much better business model as compared to a free web hosting,

just my 2 cents!!

 

[CS Squad]

well, and a free whmcs license as well.

 

[smc_]

Originally Posted by enoughhosting
Once there was a time and a place in a kingdom far far far away where people used to pay to upgrade and settle for paid hosting eventually.

People still do, and some will offer donations too. The problem is that most (almost all) will not. You can't usually rely on the paid upgrades to pay the server bills anymore, unfortunately.

Asking for donations doesn't say much about the hosting provider. As they are the ones who chose to open a free web hosting business. Sites like 0......... are backed by paid hosting service from the Father company. So the niche has been established for them and it works.

If you are just starting out, you will need other websites that generate revenue, unless you want to pay out of pocket every month. Which makes no sense what so ever.

It does take some time and patience to get going. We used to be PR4 and then we had to close shop for various reasons. That hurt us once we opened again - but the steps for generating traffic are the exact same. SEO, Marketing and good content.


Shaun

 

[binil]

You can expect to get 3 - 5 signups per day if seo is good. There are loads of free hosts with good features these days...

 

[Seraphim]

If you are just starting out, you will need other websites that generate revenue, unless you want to pay out of pocket every month. Which makes no sense what so ever.

Odd. I was under the impression that this would be the most sensible way to start. Assuming your personal finances had enough available to support the startup long term, you could pay out of pocket for as long as you needed to.

Over time the revenue generation would improve, and eventually you get to where I am now- the bills are starting to pay themselves instead of hitting me up each month.

Even if you had an existing site to generate funding with, you would still be spending money that originally would have gone to your pocket for a long time before you even get close to earning it back. Only advantage is the expense of said site becomes cheaper when resources to power it come from a pool that is also used by other revenue sources.

 

[smc_]

Paying out of pocket doesn't apply to just cash cost. The physical time and energy put into building a small online hosting company, for example, will not get compensated. The services after the fact make money. Eventually that needs to pay for the lease or colo space which should be any web host provider's priority.

Unless first timers have a disposable income, other means of generating revenue need to be addressed. Depending how ambitious someone is can determine revenue success in small bursts. Reinvest your gains responsibly and it will start to pay for itself in no time.



Shaun

 

[Aolyis]

Why not, in principle, with good SEO and advertising in the media taky result well within reach, however, the issue of return of the project is strongly moving away!

 

[0xHost]

It helps if you have a few sites generating traffic to advertise on too, worth getting a blog going if you dont have one.

 

[MilesGeek]

I don't really think people prefer free web hosting now a days. The website owners can't take a chance with website performance as it is one of the important aspects of being in the competition. Affordable web hosting preferred over the free web hosting.

 

[deanhills]

I see demand for free hosting right down. It is not as easy to make money on free hosting as it used to be a few years ago. I hear many complaints about Google Ads being stopped out of the blue or not as lucrative as it had been in the past. Hacking and DdoSing have increased as well, so one needs to spend more money on beefing up security as well as keeping all software and licenses current. One also has to find technical admin who are willing to support free hosts for the love of it. I don't see that many around any longer. I'd say most of the more quality free hosting is attached to paid hosting.

 

[deeplist]

The demand for free hosting isn't anything now. Back in the day, people would give their left testicle to get 20 MB of free webspace... Yeah, 20 MEGABYTES. These days, you can't hardly GIVE AWAY 2000 MB for free without people snubbing their nose at you. Social networking has taken over and there's just no point anymore. Blogging, photo uploads, etc can all be done through social networking and there's really no point in providing free hosting anymore because, quite frankly, nobody cares. The market has dried up. The only people who want free webspace these days are tech savvy folks who just want a sandbox to develop some "project" that ultimately will never take off. I don't know how many free accounts I provided to people who requested them here on this forum and the account sat dormant, or they uploaded some content and then never did anything else with it. Hosting in general has pretty much just become a waste of time. I still offer hosting, even after all these years and will continue to do so, but I have shifted the main focus of my company away from hosting and towards more profitable ventures such as government auctions, warehouse leasing, eBay consignment and electronic waste recycling.