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Free hosting, Guide to hosting services.

To begin with, let us move a bit away from technical details and have a more «economic» look at the issue of ‘free’ hosting. Then, one thing we’d positively see, is that absolute majority of Internet users understand the term ‘free’ as having something they don’t have to pay for. And in 99% they are wrong. In most cases, this term means that there’s no monetary payment for the ‘free’ service. Just the same, in case of the ‘free’ hosting, normally, we’re talking about some non-monetary form of payment for the services.

Knowing the business model of the hosting services provider is critically important when deciding about publishing the website in a ‘free’ hosting space. It is better to say, this knowledge would be the basis of such a decision. A clear and transparent business model allows right decisions to be made, ensuring effective use of time and funds and thus avoiding disappointments in the long run. At the same time, popular labels such as ‘free cheese is only in the mousetrap’ or ‘free is only garbage’ do not reflect the reality, often being inspired by some personal negative experience caused by not willing to go into detail.

So, how does a hosting provider benefit from the ‘free’ service? Why does he carry expenditures, both in terms of equipment wear-and-tear and human resource? Pure altruism? No way. There always are quite specific reasons and clearly defined benefits. The major of these are:

Revenue from advertisement placed in the users’ websites.

Let us first look at the scheme where the revenue is gained from banner-based advertisement. There are many different opinions on this subject, both written and spoken. A number of authors are making quite earnest declarations that hosting providers make “crazy money” from their poor customers’ websites. Other authors seriously doubted if the idea is feasible at all. However, the truth, as always, is somewhere in between.

Of course, there is some profit, though it is far from being ‘crazy money’. Many free hosting providers closed after the series of banner ad market collapses, which means that this business model, which they relied on, could not stand the trial of market. However, many still use this system to earn their bread. If you are thinking about booking yourself a free hosting, you may find the following information useful.

Advertisement placed on the free hosted websites, usually, is very cheap. Expensive is only content-specific advertisement – one that is placed on the websites that advertised company’s clients are likely to visit. 

Calculating the revenue that your hosting provider will earn from your website, be careful not to overestimate. Another popular myth that is that hosting providers can benefit from blocking popular websites to earn from banner ads placed on error pages. This is not true. Ad banners on the pages of a popular website will definitely earn more than error pages. Placing advertisement costs little but nothing, with very rare exceptions, on the web chat and forum pages. Most of these websites are visited by more or less stable groups of people. There is no point in showing them the same banner every time they come. At the same time, hosting these websites is costly for the hosting provider.

Attracting customers to sign up for paid hosting.

Attracting customers to sign up for paid hosting – is one of the most popular reasons to offer ‘free’ hosting. Under this model, the customer gets involved into a very popular scheme – ‘try it, then buy it’. A very reasonable option, but unfortunately, wrong implementation can kill the whole idea. Normally, if a customer does not yet have a clear idea of the purpose of the website and cannot estimate all costs and benefits, he or she signs up for a ‘free’ hosting. In the future, as the website grows and webmaster becomes more proficient, some additional services are purchased with following full transition to a paid account. However, it is not uncommon that the whole affair is implemented in a different way. Hosting provider offers maximum services fee of charge, without any requirements towards banner placement, etc. After some critical mass of customers is accumulated, hosting provider announces that “Finita, ladies and gentlemen. Your free accounts have become paid ones, effective tomorrow”. Their bet is laziness and inertness of customers. If 10-20 per cent of clients did not go, the business was worth it. Fortunately, customers quickly become educated and now these tricks are used less and less.

Building reputation

Reputation is a serious issue for any hosting provider, but usually, it’s not reputation alone. It is extremely difficult to bet on reputation when shopping for hosting services. However, this could be the case when provider is trying to get an important sponsor. In this case, opening free hosting allows attracting large number of clients literally in days. However, it is very difficult, without some in-depth knowledge of the details of the deal, to judge about reliability and sustainability of such free hosting. Nevertheless, for the hosting provider, offering free services in such situation can be beneficial, considering profits from other, paid hosting services. 

Debugging and testing hosting software

Providing free services to test hosting software (as well as testing technical support service) is a practice used mostly by western companies. In certain cases, hiring specialist testers is more expensive than paying the costs of hardware and Internet traffic. A good example of this type of free a hoster could be well-known f2s.com. One can hardly count on the long life of a project like this one, although this can be balanced by a good package of pro-level services.

Insufficient outgoing traffic

Insufficient outgoing traffic which affects internal settlements with other hosting providers is a typical situation for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In this situation, ISP may find that building up big pool of clients on paid basis would be too slow, whereas free services populate the servers much faster. However, internal settlements between channel operators make it hard to predict how long or how reliable the free hosting provided by such ISP would be.

Another possible option for a free hosting is when an ISP hosts websites of their Internet access customers. This business is very profitable for the ISP, if the websites generate mostly internal traffic, for example, it is a corporate internal website, visited mostly by the company employees. However, in this case, it is doubtful that hosting services are truly ‘free’, because the company is paying for its employees accessing its own website, whereas ISP’s costs are minimal.

Extra traffic at discounted price

Subscribing for more traffic and getting a discounted price is another option, which is rarely used alone. It is based on the ISP tendency to buy more traffic than it is required to service their clients. For example, ISP’s actual requirement is 1.2 terabytes per month. Subscribing for 1 terabyte and paying for extra traffic used would not be effective – it is better to go for 2 terabytes, at a significantly discounted price, and as a result, get some 800 ‘free’ gigabytes, and use them for a ‘free’ hosting with banner advertisement. Типа, с паршивой овцы - хоть шерсти клок.  

Stealing ideas / content

It also happens, from time to time, that a ‘free’ hoster only wants to feed on somebody’s fresh ideas or content. After quote obvious ethical reasons, we will not discuss this case here. Just one thing worth mentioning is that, large hosting providers do not do such things, opting for partnerships under normal business practice instead. Such partnership may take a form of sponsorship with the shares held by the webmaster and the sponsoring provider.

Let’s get back to the technical aspects of hosting. After all, all these business models were described so much in detail because they are critical to know in order to understand what technical resources will be available to the ‘free’ hosting subscriber.

Let us take the following technical peculiarity for an example: enabling scripts and custom settings for each site hosted would require an individual record for each virtual host to be added into the server configuration files, taking additional hardware resources. Each <VirtualHost ...> record occupies approximately 10 kb of memory of the Apache webserver, which is the most popular platform used for this kind of hosting. It means, each website with enabled scripts and custom settings, no matter, working or not, consumes the hardware resources, which, consequently, means that the hosting provider would feel very uneasy about sites with few visitors. On the other hand, hosting provider who does not enable these technical options, may set their server up to translate name of the website into a file directory record. In this case, it would not be required to register each website hosted in the configuration file. In this case, sites with few visitors provide even more benefit – disk space is cheap.

Business model can also tell, whether database support will be enabled. If it’s a testing and debugging option – take it all, give it a try! If you pay by showing banner ad, be sure that provider will carefully calculate, how much resources does your website consume, and check, whether the profit it generates justifies the expense. Extra load on the SQL server is also a resource, which your website consumes.

Are you allowed to send emails using your scripts? Mailserver workload is also a resource that you need to pay for.

On the other hand, this approach has significant benefits. Most paid hosting providers charge you for some fixed set of services, and it does not matter whether you actually use them or not. It is very questionable that provider would offer you a discount below a certain level, if your website has only few visitors. In case of ‘free’ hosting, you payment exactly matches the requirements of your website: consuming little, you pay for little, consuming more, you pay for more.

Try to get a website generating around 40-50 Gb traffic per month hosted under a standard subscription plan– most probably, provider would offer you to change to a dedicated server. There will be no such a problem if hosting provider is your partner and earns from the advertisement placed at your website. Vice versa, if it appears that your hosting provider is not quite happy to host your site ‘free’, it is a clear sign that expenses and revenues associated with your site are not quite balanced, and most possibly, if you decide to switch to a paid hosting service, your site won’t earn the expense from banner ads posted on it. Hosting providers know well how to calculate cost - benefit ratio, and it is a good idea to use their expertise. Registration is another important thing. If you are not required to describe your site prior to obtaining a hosting, it is most likely that for some time your site will be monitored – so to say, to judge you by your deeds. Registration is also an element of a business model. Registration-wise, there are two types of hosting providers: those with free registration and registration by appointment. In the first case, registration process is easy, but the provider is most likely to have a developed system to block the websites that forego the rules. It the second case, it may so happen that you won’t get the hosting at all. It is also likely that type one hosters have more fail-proof hardware and some backup resources.

Let us discuss technical and economic aspects associated with placing advertisement banners. So to say – take a look at the figures. To the day, advertisement placed in the ‘free’ hosted websites worth around USD 0,3 per 1000 demonstrations. The cost of traffic paid by an average provider is around USD 1 per 1 Gb. It means, 1 Gb of traffic is equal to 3000 demonstrations, and there is 300 Kb of traffic per one demonstration. Of course, this is only a very rough estimation as it does not include the hardware and maintenance costs, rent of premises and profit. However, you may use these calculations as a guideline to get an idea of what you site needs to squeeze in to be guaranteed from the problems with provider, because nobody will host a site that generates losses. For example, a good way to make your site unprofitable is to place downloadable files at the hosting that gets money from banner ads. In this case, reaction won’t take long.

Another resource to discuss is workload of the server’ CPU. Calculating its cost definitely goes beyond only traffic. However, the idea is that scripts that do not display banners do not pay for themselves. That is why ‘free’ hosters so much dislike tops and counters such as SpyLog, etc. It is also that balancing server workload is a complicated affair. In the most cases, script must require up to 1 second to run. If your scripts take longer, most probably, ‘free’ hosting is not an option for you. On the other hand, strict requirements of the hosting provider make you optimize your site. It is a very good school. If you managed to squeeze into the requirements, it is most likely that you won’t have problems with the other types of hosting.

There is one more aspect to highlight – domain name promotion. You have to remember that the 3rd level domain name provided to you by the hoster is their property. Its promotion is worth the expense only if you are sure of the future of the website. Typical scenery is that before promotion, website requires less resources, and even if not all requirements are followed, hosting provider doesn’t pay much attention to that. Yet, as the website becomes popular, the number of visitors increases significantly, attracting careful attention of hosting provider’s administrator. And in this situation, there will be no pampering – every slight abuse of the requirements will be punished. There are only two good options. The first one is continuous monitoring of the website’s compliance to the requirements. Second one is registration of a second-level domain name and linking it to a website under a ‘free’ hosting. Many providers offer this service, which is worth USD 2-3 per month. As the website grows beyond the limitations of the free hosting, you may go for the paid services without changing the name, which saves all your expense taken to promote the site.

Let us summarize these notes with some brief notes and recommendations on the ‘free’ hosting.

First of all, ‘free’ hosting is indeed a useful and beneficial for both provider and the client, model.

Second, only a professional provider with a well-designed and realistic business model can provide a reliable and sustainable ‘free’ hosting.

Third, careful and detailed assessment of both hosting provider and the website itself is fundamental for getting a good ‘free’ hosting for your website is only possible. One could indeed be surprised to know how many large and respectable companies’ websites live on the ‘free’ hostings for years because there’s no point in changing it to the paid ones.

Fourth, ‘free’ hostings are not offered by newbies. And if they do, they do not live long. However strange the requirements and recommendations of the hosting provider may appear, in most cases, behind them are rich experience and a clear understanding of the situation. Test driving your project on such hosting alone can often be very useful. If your ‘free’ hosting is regularly discontinued, maybe it’s not the provider’s fault. Maybe something is wrong with the website itself? Vise versa, if the project lives over a long period of time with the considerable number of visitors, it is a signal that everything is going on well.

Recommendations are also quite easy:

First of all, you have to mobilize your critical thinking. Evaluate the services provided by the hosting provider and the ‘price’ required to pay. Use indirect data to identify business model used to understand how sustainable it is, and whether it corresponds to your needs.

If you decide to find out, for example, how stable are the hoster’s servers, you may also wish to know, how this is achieved. And vise versa, if hosting provider’s servers are down from time to time, the blame should not always go to the poor technical support – quite possibly, the downtime is caused by some daring technical solutions being tested (the main purpose of creating this hosting service). If you have your own technical implementations to test, this might well be the best option for that.  

Be very critical towards anything you hear about a specific provider. You will have to pick whatever pieces of useful information from any available sources:

1. This hoster is bad, it killed by site!
   (And what kind of website was that? Would your website have enjoyed such a neighborhood).
2. The hoster is excellent!
   (And what kind of website is this? A homepage with two dozens visitors per month?)
3. Technical support service is outrageous!
   (And how much money does your website generate?)
4. et cetera…

What may have caused somebody’s negative response, may be of a benefit to you.

Remember, there are no miracles, and if they are, they are extremely rare. Wait before blaming technical support. Maybe, you simply are not generating enough money yet?

You also have to remember that many things were simply credited to you as an advance. Do not ask for too much from the beginning. If you are indeed building up something worthy, you are likely to get what you are asking for. But right after the registration your site is terra incognita for your hoster, they won’t know what to expect from you and your site.

And, most importantly, forget about ‘free’ stuff. Better refer to it as ‘not for money’. Read hosting provider’s requirements carefully – in most cases, they describe how do you pay for it.