Free Hosting?

[crabfoot]

Lately, when looking for something entirely different, I have come across two offers of completely free web hosting - with useful space and bandwidth. And I'm not talking about those Micky Mouse subdomain hosts, either.

How do these people make money? Do they suddenly start charging when they reach a certain size, and rely on inertia to keep their customers? Or is there something I do not know about?

I'm thinking of giving one a try -

 

[Skinner]

What are the bandwidth and disk space allowances ?

Most of these sites give you like 2.5gb diskspace the 100mb bandwidth, like heart internet do, however 100mb bandwidth won't last you long a all, so they hope you'll upgrade rather than tranfer out.

 

[Systreg]

I use free hosts for all of my sites, ideal for mini sites at no cost, at 50webs.com I have about 20 domains hosted with small sites on them at present, they give this on their free hosting, and uptime is good with them:

Hosted domains: Unlimited
Disk space: 60 MB
Bandwidth: Unlimited
Ads: No ads of any kind

I have also used the free hosting on 110mb.com for ages, there is some stuff you need to pay for, it's about a $9 one off payment to turn SQL and CGI on, but I don't use that stuff anyway, they are usually pretty good uptime wise, if there is a problem, they seem to fix it quickly, they are having a problem at the moment, though, as sites are down or lagging, even their site:

5 GB Space - FREE
PHP 5 - FREE!
FTP (chmod enabled) - FREE!
Sendmail (PHP Mail) - *Must activate
Your Own Domain Hosting - FREE!
Safe Mode OFF - FREE!
CGI/Perl - *Must activate
300 GB Bandwidth - FREE!
SSI - FREE!
MYSQL 5 - *Must activate
IonCube & Zend Support - FREE!
NO popups, spam or ads ANYWHERE
Python - *Must activate

 

[fermes]

awardspace.com have a really good free hosting option. I have been using it one a few sites for a good while now.

 

[crabfoot]

The one that interested me is i6networks - 5GB discspace and 1Tb bandwidth.

What I find strange is that they only accept existing sites, nothing under 30 days old. Without ads, how do they make money?

 

[easyman]

Note that HeartInternet doesn't offer backups or support on their free hosting accounts. In fact most free web hosting providers don't provide support.

www.FreeVirtualServers.com used to offer completely free hosting but now charges a nominal set-up fee but offer daily backups and 24/7 technical support!

 

[crabfoot]

I went to 110mb.com and read their version - according to them, most free hosts build up their membership to about 15k, then sell the site to a naive buyer.

Fair enough I thought, I'll sign up - got the message "team of trained monkeys working on our servers. Registration opening soon" ...