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Is there still an interest for free web hosting?
About 4 years ago was the "peak" of free web hosting. There were so many free hosting companies competing for clients, most people who ran them had a bit of extra cash and wanted to run free web hosting as a hobby and to learn.
I was thinking about running a small unique free host for the reasons above, maybe buying a VPS in Iceland and installing a control panel such as VestaCP.
Do you think I would be getting legit clients looking for free hosting, where they would host their blog/forum/personal/testing website? There are so many exotic and interesting locations where I can attract a user base, such as in Iceland.
Or would I just DDoS attacks and illegal/spam websites from the middle east? It seems like the trend for free web hosting is going down, as web hosting and servers become cheaper every year.
Thanks in advance, lars.
Comments
I don't think so.
._.
offer free VPS and you'll have plenty of interest
I would allow everything, as long as it is legal and not abusive to the server and its resources. Of course, everything must comply with the provider's AUP/TOS but most LEB providers seem pretty open minded about things, as long as it isn't illegal.
Haha I'm not made of money!
I don't think there is a lack of demand for free web hosting. It's where a lot of people get their start.
From my view, in the next few years I expect the market to shift from free web hosting to free VPS(s), as technologies such as IPv6 become more widely available and hardware costs (i.e. dedicated servers) start to drop even faster. Take Host1Free for example.
But, there will always be a section of the market who just wants free hosting, and not a VPS
I can see your point, and it is most likely true. Lets say I were to offer free VPS(s) though.
Firstly, where and how would I get money for it? Or would companies be willing to donate servers?
Well, most free hosting websites run along the way of P2H, Donations, or forcing users to put ads on their website. Each has their own advantages, as well as disadvantages.
As for donating VPS, it's not unheard of for hosts to donate a VPS here and there. But, it's not very common, you'd need a high traffic website in order for them to want to sponsor you. From what I remember, some hosts would give a VPS if you had a website with an Alexa ranking of <100,000 and a PR of 2.
If a host did give you a VPS, you'd be held on a short leash. Any abuse notifications would have to be dealt with in an extremely short manner, that's why most free hosts just suspended or terminate your account. At least, that's what my memory serves me
First, you should read @KuJoe's book - there's a link on freewebhostingtalk.com or PM me and I'll send you a link. (He released it for free)
I don't know what the demand is these days but the hassle ratio is very high from what I've heard.
FWHT is a ghost town, if that says anything.
Yes, that is what puts me off starting off one. The free hosts that do exist seem to be used just for spam and illegal purposes. Not all websites are like that though; free web hosting is the reason I am here today.
FWHT is very inactive, I have visited many times but there doesn't seem to be very many genuine users or interest.
I know for a small amount of money per month I have nothing to lose, but at the same time I don't want to run one for nothing.
I open up free stock from time to time.
Actually, I decided to add 10 accounts to celebrate that I am home again.
So your free plan is 100MB and 1G bandwidth. I think this typifies free hosting - for most people who want to put something on the web, they can get a ton more resources for even $1/month. For people who can't afford that, there's free hosting, and that's your typical free hosting customer base.
Well, that and people building link farms.
I provide free vps's it does not cost that much.
I think it will be abused.
I suppose in a sense I provide free hosting...I have at least 20 family/friends who needed web hosting and I gave them accounts/host their domains. But that's more like giving a friend a ride to the store because you're going there anyway.
Opening it up to the general public is another matter.
100MB isn't much at all. When it comes to free web hosting, what is wrong with 5GB? It's not like 99.5% of customers will be using anywhere near that amount, and offering a large quota will attract a larger target auidience. Dropbox provides 5GB free, so does Google Drive so why not free web hosting?
I wasn't thinking of creating a "typical low end free hosting" site, I want to make something new, simple and unique. I don't want to be known as a "free web host," I want to be known as "web hosting that is free" in a good location with quality service if that makes sense to you.
For example Google and Wordpress have free blog hosting, so why not replace paid/expensive web hosting with FREE web hosting? I don't understand how the trend for free hosting is going down, maybe it is because of the lack of quality providers?
Makes a great landing page for every day purpose.
And for those who needs more resources, there are packages at $3 or $5 / year.
More then enough for the general wordpress/jomla/name your cms.
Or host your email if you don't want to use gmail or hotmail.
if it's for learning, I'd go for something like heroku, I mean you will get to learn alot and also won't get your ip's banned for copyrighted material or stuff like that, just hosting small JSON web-services with small databases and small of everything for free, then you charge a few bucks to add stuff.. It sounds like fun for me.
good luck!
this looks promising for starters http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9802259/why-do-people-use-heroku-when-aws-is-present-whats-distinguishing-about-heroku
What if your server crashed and you lost their data though? I can imagine it being extremely awkward.
I had a Host1Free VPS until they were hacked a year ago. Everything was lost, but I didn't complain. It was free, and it came with no stipulation that they would continue the service forever, nor that they would protect and secure my data. Of course, I kept external backups and never expected anything else.
What was truly amazing to see was the howling, whining, and petulant demands that appeared on the Host1Free forums after the attack. The Host1Free people were working around the clock to salvage as much as they could for their paying customers and to keep their business alive, while the freeloaders called them all kinds of vile things. What a bunch of ingrates!
I never went back to Host1Free. They never restored my free VPS, and the restart process was too much trouble. To be honest, the free VPS had terrible performance, and I would rather pay a few dollars a month on a LEB VPS. Yeah, the LEB VPSs have their own issues, but the prices are very low, and they are a major step up from the Host1Free VPSs.
Hopefully raindog308 has made it clear to family and friends that they are getting a courtesy service with minimum support. If they want reliability, safety, and data integrity guarantees, then they should know to move to a paid service that meets their needs. If I were raindog308, I might send them a friendly note that says:
"I just read about a hosting provider who had their system hacked recently. Let me remind you that hardware failures can happen and hackers can breach the most secure systems. I am happy to provide you with a place to host your websites, and will do my best to keep everything secure. I do not expect any changes for a very long time, but allow me to remind you that I may not be able to host your websites forever, and if some disaster befalls us, I cannot guarantee that your data can be restored. You must take responsibility to keep your own backup copies of your data, just in case."
My backup regimen is better than most hosts :-) Go read the backup policies for HostGator, Dreamhost, etc. - really, virtually all shared hosting companies say "we don't guarantee we will restore" or "restores are a best-effort courtesy".
I back everyone up along with myself - home, backup VPS, S3.
But yeah, your overall point is good...these are all semi-technical people.
Would they at least hand over that backup though? That is pretty shitty but those guys are still pretty low end. Bad but they are so huge it's to be expected at that price really, especially with their audience.
edit: @lars to answer the question, maybe... but I think you should learn a bit more about the industry first.
Yep. I do the same. I hate to have to tell anyone their stuff is gone, and without fail it's always the guy who hasn't been keeping his own backups. It could still happen, but at least I can say I gave it my best effort (6 disk RAID10 + nightly offsite differential backups). It was also much easier to automate backing everything up than to pick and choose between my stuff and my customers' stuff.
Years ago I used to offer free shell accounts that could be used for web hosting, MUDs, programming projects, etc. When they were completely free I had a ton of interested people and a lot of them wanted to use them for questionable purposes. What surprised me though was how many people got their account and then didn't use it for anything at all. I was constantly weeding out accounts that were over 6 months old, had been logged into exactly once, and had no files in them.
It didn't take long for me to begin requiring a small donation for an account. For a long time I accepted old hardware, a few bucks, web design or graphics work, and other trades for accounts and that worked really well for what I was trying to do. I've still got a lot of those folks on my server today (which is now a VM) and they've almost all become close friends over the years.
Even with a very minimal barrier to entry the demand decreased a huge amount, but the quality of the interested parties improved immeasurably. I'd definitely recommend not doing a completely free service even if it's meant as community service or a charity or something. If you require people to make some kind of very minimal show of good faith you'll weed out a huge percentage of the people you (I assume) don't want to attract.
In most cases, they'd have a restore, but every single shared hosting company I've ever seen specifically disclaims the ability to restore for users. Here are some actual quotes taken from shared hosting company's web pages. I gathered them once for a project but don't remember which is which host - but they're all major hosts:
"(Company)'s back-up process is provided as a courtesy and (company) is not responsible for files and/or data residing on your account. Any account larger than 5 gigabytes will be excluded from our backup system."
"We can restore...this is NOT a procedure you should rely on. We make no guarantees about our weekly backups, and we do require a $15 fee to restore."
"Dreamhost makes no guarantees at all for actually backing up your data so personally I wouldn't rely on this. You seem to get very little control over what has been backed-up or when so restoring is also somewhat hit-and-miss." (from the Dreamhost wiki)
@raindog308 yelp, with their size I wouldn't like to be working their help desk during a hardware failure.
I also host friends and people I know for free, from 100 GB to 3-4 TB VPSes, but most are at home with low power setups. No guarantee for restore as these are backups mostly anyway. There are my voxility servers for those people which wish to have some CPU too as well as guaranteed speeds. There is usually not free unless friends. Since I know everyone, had no abuse issues yet.
just curious, why there is no post about free web hosting here?
Rules say only products with root access and there are some exceptions such as VPN where permission is granted beforehand.
This forum is focused torwards giving users root access, such as a VPS or dedicated server and not "shared".
Free web hosting can be useful for testing the company web hosting services as far as i know. If there is need for trying out some new web hosting services...Go for it else make some money talk for hassle free life.