I am considering offering free web hosting to get the traffic to our site and get people in our forums.

Is it worth the hassles? Any suggestions?

What we are considering is:
25 megs of space
1 gig of transfer
NO email
Yes FTP access
No adverts

Of course NO adult material, no mp3's and other rules would apply.
We would require a certain amount of useful posts in the forums to keep the free hosting.
We will NEVER be offering paid hosting so they would have to go to someone else. Which is actually a good thing becuase if they choose someone from our list they can share their experience and vote or if they go to someone else they can let us know who it is and we can add the host and then they could vote and share their experiences...

I am just not sure if it is worth the hassles... any comments would be appreciated.

You have 50% of add space on the end customers site. thru
http://www.communityarchitect.com now owned by the same people as juno and netzero formerly ran by about.com. I use it to offer free hosting. free to sign up make a % if they ever move up to paid services, and dont take up your own server resources.

I don't want it to be that way. There will be NO ad space on the customers site.

They just have to have a certain amount of posts in the forums.

well it would attract people to your site - but is the cost to you going to be worth it? maybe if u offered paying upgrades or a small advert u could recover some of the costs. You have to take into account the amount of people that signup to free hosting offers aswell - might over run your servers or just take up too much of your time to look after.

Definantely worth considering though.

Thanks for the replys... We will NOT be offering paid hosting at any time. If the customers wants more storage, bandwidth or email they will have to go to someone else offering paid hosting.

Then they can come back to our site and vote on the host they went with, so it is a win win..


We have decided to go ahead and offer the free hosting. I will post in sometime and let you guys know how it is going..

Wish us luck.. Thanks again..

I do sincerely wish you good luck.

We offer free hosting however now it is only for organizations and individuals that are involved in community or charitable work, due to the fact that we had way to many undesirable and illegal sites being placed on our servers.

Be warned free hosting if not done right can be a logistical nightmare, so my advise would be to carefully screen all who apply and then you will need to keep a constant eye on the content of the free sites to ensure that you don't get a angry email from your datacenter.

Yes, good luck, but you also have to be VERY aware that free hosting can unfortunately be used alot by hackers and spammers which is a shame.

Good luck, and if you are moderating the content of the sites you host - should be fine!

So far I haven't had any problems. I get the new sign ups on my log watch, I check the site, if it's not acceptable, I delete it.

It is the way you do a business and strategies that you apply which decide you succeed or fail

We have decided to not go to the free hosting. I want to stay away from that and keep the site what I intended it to be.

We are in the process of having the site complete revamped design and programming!

The new site should be ready in a couple of weeks..

Thanks guys/gals..

lots of people abuse free hosts. If don't have any advertising benefits from it, I don't advise you doing it.