I want free hosting!

by George Pratsos

When I started with my on-line ventures (and don’t imagine anything spectacular….it was just a blog), I was thinking to myself: “Why would anyone want to buy hosting when there are hundreds of free web hosting providers?” 

That might be true if you are only going to work on a blog or a very small website but even then things are not so “free” or easy as they seem to be. You’ll soon find out that free webhosting has huge limitations for someone looking to do some serious business online.

The biggest issue people come across with free hosts is that one minute they are there and the next they are gone. Not all are like that, but it’s not unusual to find that someone has set up reseller account with the hope to make some money from advertising, only to find out that this model is not viable. Which brings us to disadvantage number 2: free hosts run their own ads on your website. Well…they have to make some money from somewhere so they’ll pack your site with Google Adsense, banners etc. Won’t look good on your neat website. Other frequent technical limitations are:

• You cannot host more than one (if any) domains
• You cannot have more than 1 or 2 databases hosted
• Small disk space
• Not much bandwidth (use too  much and your account will get suspended)
• You cannot upload files larger than e.g. 500KB (is that enough to upload your WordPress blog database?)

All of the above might not be a big deal if you are starting out with something small but you’ll soon find out that it’s stopping you from doing what you want.

What I found to be the biggest disadvantage is support. Who will provide decent support for next to nothing? No one.

Go ahead and experiment with free hosting but don’t get all cozy with it. Make sure you take frequent backups (e.g. of your blog database or your website files) and then jump to a reliable web host when you feel it’s time to do some serious business.

Oh, and don’t forget to look at environmentally responsible hosting….Green is always good.

Nobody could have predicted the fall of several VPS providers during the months of July and August 2007. Many of our fallen comrades had been in the VPS business for years and their demise was quite a shock to the Hosting world.

We’ve tried to analyze the problems which caused this sudden turn of events for VPS powerhouses in an industry that is traditionally quite lucrative. The main cause seems to have been the recent occurrence of sub $10 VPS’ that are diluting the market. Some of these fallen companies started the trend and some jumped into the price-slashing fray a little later.

It is hard to sell VPS’ when you are selling one for $45 and your competitive upstart is selling the same VPS for $10. Such market pressure creates the demand for a quality product at a price lower than a provider can afford. But in order to sell, you must either slash prices or face slow sales.

Of course, although a company may slash the prices of its VPS’ offerings, the cost of hardware, bandwith and support remain constant. This is where real world business economics clash with the rabid competitiveness of the hosting industry.

It’s not un-common in this industry for companies to come and go more often than many people change their underwear. The start-up cost of a hosting company could be less than a dinner at a fine restaurant! The lure of instant profits keeps bringing people into an already saturated market.

So to all of those VPS companies who survived the burning months of August and September, we tip our hats off to you.

If most of you are like me, you’re too busy to make up your own templates. Or maybe “being busy” is a good excuse for not really having the artistic skills to create a nice looking template. If I tried to make a template, it would end up looking like Web -3.0 rather than a Web 2.0 template.

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