Free Website Hosting

The Manipulations Behind FREE Website Hosting

You know, it's one of the facts of life that very little is ever given away for FREE, especially in business...and the web hosting business is certainly no different. However, you can certainly pick up FREE website hosting from any number of sources. One of the longest-running is Yahoo Geocities, which started in 1995 and now has over 3 million members and goodness knows how many sites. 

The deal is that you receive access to their FREE server-based website builder with templates and all sorts of bells and whistles, you make your page(s) and then upload it to the web via Yahoo's FREE website hosting. It's a drag that you have their advertising banners on your pages...but what can you expect from FREE?

Somehere along the way you decide that the web address Geocities/joetightass isn't a  compelling domain name and BAM! you purchase your own domain name through Yahoo.

Then you decide that Geocities' advertising banners don't do much for your site's credibility and BAM2!  you've purchased one of Yahoo's PAID web hosting packages.

Unfortunately none of Yahoo's deals even begin to compare to any of the successful web hosting companies (see: Top 5 Web Hosting )...but that's pretty much how most FREE web hosting companies run. They give you a freebie, knowing that a certain percentage of customers will upgrade to their luxury-priced PAID web hosting at a later date. It obviously makes for a fairly decent business model, because in the Yahoo/Geocities case, if even 10% of the 3 million users upgraded (presuming they only had one site each), the math would be:

300,000 X $4.95/m (their lowest priced package) = $1.5 million/m = $18 million annually. Add domain names and miscellaneous extras and you're looking at $20-25 million a year, which is not bad for a service advertised as FREE web hosting.

One company, Dot Easy, and I'm sure there are many others, has a $0 web hosting banner-free plan but there's a catch. You have to purchase a domain name through them at a cost of $25 per annum, approximately two to three times the price of a domain anywhere else.

So, your almost FREE web hosting is about $2 per month, which is a pretty good deal if you don't have a large site or many visitors. Presently, you receive 0.1 GB of disc space & 1 GB of data transfer.

Compare that to my Top 5 Web Hosting and Doteasy are offering one three thousandth of what the best cheap web hosting firms are (for 24 month contracts) at about half the price. 

Cheap Website Hosting

100Webspace offers no banner ads, 0.5 GB of disc space & 10 GB of data transfer for $2.95m which is pretty cheap but again, they're again offering only a fraction of what you would receive from the Top 5 Web Hosting sites.

Free web hosting is great if you have no money at all but I strongly advise that you don't get caught in that loop. It really isn't worth it.