• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net

Suggestions wanted for free hosting service

B

BlackStorm

New Member
Hello,
I offer free hosting and have moved it to my main site, www.custom-hosting.net
I offer 20mb space/300mb bandwidth/ensim control panel for free.
Those are the main features anyway.
I offer features to add to accounts for community members.
By that I mean I offer options of things to add to accounts for each 20 posts a member makes in the forum.
I have just moved the whole site over to the domain name, including the forum. it was under free.custom-hosting.net before.
I just want some suggestions of how i can improve what im offering, I thing though, i wont be offering more bandwidth, maybe more space but not bandwidth im afraid.
Thanks for any suggestions,
John
 
It all seems reasonable for someone wanting to create a reliable service by making it unsuitable for the type of sites that use a lot of resources (thus slowing the service down for others).

The only addition I personally would have liked to have seen is an option for extra transfer or space for a certain number of (useful) posts. As banners are required, the extra resources should pay for themselves if file size limits are in place (I didn't see a mention of that).

You'd most likely want to make that number higher than 20 for those options though - 50 or 100 for instance.
 
It looks like a very good plan. I do not think you will need to add anymore space because of the transfer limit being 300mb.

All the other features look good too. I think it looks like a good service. The option to add more transfer would be great, since 300mb is somewhat small.
 
Yes I know 300mb is small but I havent asked one aco---- to place the banner on their site yet.
I put that in the signup as I will most likely add banners to sites in the future, so im not making anything from the free sites or directing people back to my site etc.
I dont have any ads on any of the pages on my own site either so Im paying for everything for the free accounts although I do offer special prices for upgrading and also premium services.

Maybe if I had some advertisers on the site, or even just on the forum, I could give more bandwidth but no-one has asked me about advertising yet and I havent asked anyone if they would like to advertise.
Im not sure how i could work out a price if i was to put banners on the site of free accounts and I would need some kind of rotation script also to place on the sites.

If I had some help with this and someone to advertise,I would offer more bandwidth and space :)

Thanks fo your suggestions,
John
 
Well without ads, I would say you have one of the best deals in free hosting. Ad-free,20mb space, 300mb transfer, plus php is just gravy on top of this. Just keep it reliable and fast, and I think you will have quite a successful service
 
Thank you :)
I wont be overselling so the service wont suffer at all.
Its very fast, feel free to test the speed of www.custom-hosting.net and www.hosting-talk.net which is on another server.
Want to provide something thats fast and reliable for free, think im doing it well enough so far but always want to find ways to improve it :)
Thanks,
John
 
Seems pretty good, but if people require more transfer, maybe on certain conditions, give them about 500mb?
 
I would do that but only if I think they are helping the community.
I always reward anyone that is helping out by helping others.
Normally i upgrade them to cPanel but it would be a choice to just upgrade the bandwidth.
I really need to get either some advertisers or banners for the sites to link back to my website, I think that I would be able to offer more if I done this but I know many people would not want banners.
I say on the signup page banners are placed on the sites but havent been doing this since i started offering the free service.
John
 
Perhaps do like exalted hosting does. Have a smaller endplan with no ads, and then another plan with ads and a bit more features/transfer/space. Then, people that don't like banners can go without them on the smaller plan, and the people that need a bit more of something can live with the banners and get what they need. Everyone wins :)
 
Good idea :)
Think I will be doing that soon.
Do you think its too much if I asked the users to make 4-5 posts a month on the forum if they have free accounts?
I would like the site to be a good community but atm most people get hosting and dont come back.
Just trying to think of some things to make it better..
Thanks for the help,
John
 
Nope, I don't think that'd be a problem at all. In a way, it should help you weed out abusers...people who work for their hosting (post in forums) are less likely to abuse your service.
 
5 some posts a month is easy stuff and will help weed out the people that care less about their pages/account. I think that is a good idea
 
Ok thanks, will introduce that soon,
Wont be very strict on the current members though but will still ask them to do it.
The main thing I want is a community which will help each other, think if i do that then it will mean only community members will signup, hopefully anyway :)
I want to offer a number of free services through the site, this is just the first of many to come.
Always going to make sure its as reliable as possible and offer as good a servce as I can.
Still kind of hard as its only me offering support to the free accounts but still try reply as soon as I can.
anyone else have any more ideas?
Im sure these will help improve the service.
Thanks again,
John
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top