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That's not strictly true. When your site is fully static (which seems to be a requirement for Netlify), it'd be just as easy to auto-scale Heroku, since you don't have state to deal with.
Not that I think that this kind of "scalability" is a thing that people generally need, though. This pretty much summarizes my thoughts on the matter.
I agree, indeed! And nice article there
@joepie91 that's exactly what happened to Host1Free - no one wanted to convert to Host1Plus, so they closed it down
EDIT: cPanel redirects to Eleven2 Hosting
@doghouch, we won't have that issue, specially because we aren't looking to cover costs with upgrades, but with AdSense in our site.
On the other hand, indeed, they are our current server provider. Where do you get this redirection?
Don't ruin my drama.
Those days are long gone.
We've made calculations and we'll be able to cover costs with that. We'll also enable donations and sell domain names and other extra services to cover costs. This will be enough for sure, bearing in mind that the initial investment is done from our own captital.
Any profit will be welcome in the future, but that won't be our priority
With every resources being literally unlimited on the free plan & only expensive domain providers out there surely you will have a lot of tempting options for you to still make a coin...waaait..
Free hosting has had it's day to be honest, yes there are a few decent services around but they vet applicants properly and ensure abuse is dealt with. As a result they don't get a significant number of users and therefore generate no income by any means.
For all other free hosting services they are abuse ridden cesspits much like all the youhosting resellers that only really serve India and China in the main.
If you are as suggested above using a service like Eleven2 it won't be long before they withdraw services and shut you down. They simply won't tolerate the abuse reports.
Good luck anyway, as always I will be around to tell you "I told you so".
Hello,
We are controlling abuse ourselves. Our services will not be like those offered by youhosting, where only scam gets hosted. In fact, we already have hundreds of users, and our services are 100% clean.
Yes, we've just started, but we are following a very detailed businessplan. We provide a high qualiry free web hosting service, which will be self-sufficient from a capital point of view. If we create a reputable community, I am sure we will be able to cover costs with adsense in OUR site, extra paid services and if ever needed, a donation system.
If we have a self-sufficient community of 1M validated users let's say, it is definitely not hars at all to monetize it.
Brother , coming from someone who did free hosting on a massive scale and another free hosting pioneer @kujoe can vouch, have backup plan. Seriously. Have backup funding available. Because free users barely donates. Some once in a blue moon upgrades. Adsense pay isn't as big as what it was.
1M validated users you say? That is fine. I get it. But how do you plan to host and manage 1m people with literally no other income backup? Plan this to be a loss leading project not something that would pay for it self even in the longest term. Unless of course you want to resell that crappy youhosting stuff.
Be wary of abuse. There is no perfect system to manage abuse but you have to be proactive. I remember ipanel used to be very neat for free hosting and p2h stuff. But then again, no decent user with half a brain would signup for p2h hosting. Which where having a community kicks in. It is good to have 1m validated users. But I will telll you this, barely 1% will post.
And now going to 1m. It is a very very long shot. Even for free hosting.
All the best though.
Hi there,
Thanks a lot for this very valuable piece of advice @seriesn
@kujoe do please feel free to drop your thoughts!
Alright, let's see. Let's share some stuff as I think that you can definitely add value to this:
In our case, AdSense would pay us around 7$ per 1000 visits (not impressions). We are spending a lot of money on marketing (sunk costs, which we aren't going to contabilize afterwards), and we expect to have 10.000 visitors per day by Jan 2017.
5.000 visits per day is $35 per day which is around $1k ads revenue per month, starting in Jan 2017. We also expect to have around 10.000 clients in total.
Alright, server costs. Let's assume we have a dedicated server, to make calculations here simpler. We expect to have around $700 monthly server costs by then.
We want this to be the very best free web hosting service, made by people, for people. As we grow, we will expand our servers and we will offer free web hosting to more and more people.
These are just some basic numbers which have something to do with what we are offering. Timing and many other variables may differ.
You really need to take all this to a forum that cares about free hosting, this is not it. if it's really on Eleven2 someone will DDoS it shortly just to make a point to you. Crazy kids on here.
If you really have access to 1m users then why are you here?
This shit is going to work, and I'll prove it. It's been around for 2 weeks and you just need to check our alexa rank out to see how much we've grown within no time at all. And just posted it here because I thought that I could definitely grab some really good advice from experienced users. Wasn't looking for anything else actually
Loooooooooool
All good as you planned. But the big question is, what happens if you do not get 5k visitores per day? Hell what happens if you barely get 1k visitors per day by that time? Everything looks good on paper. Like a lots of host that starts their "business". Yes, I will make 1$ profit per server, within a month I will sell 100+ server because LEB, LET and WHT gets me 1000 visitors. And I continue growing and boom, I am the next BUYVM! Just to realize after 6 month, they only get 50 signup with 30% cancellation. Then one day, you decide to wake up and say eff it I am broke, I got no mullah to keep this running and we see threads popping up.
Please take this as an advice, not only for free hosting but any kind of business startups, you need to have a plan B for supporting your project. 12Mo-18mo is a typical ROI for any half decent business plan.
And I will tell you this, as much as cocky @LEE might sound,95% of the time, this guy actually knows what he is talking about without going much into details.
Oh dear.
Lol at someone using an Alexa rank like it's of any value.
OK I get that but with all your experience from the past and very few people here interested in or providing free hosting it's not the best place. I would recommend a free hosting forum if I could find one that is not completely dead.
My target for LET is 100%, I have failed...
Try not to be sober during that 5% time period..
@seriesn,
Thanks a lot for the advice, honestly. I'll use it wisely.
@Lee,
Indeed, essentially all the free hosting forums are dead. All free web hosting providers are really bad, and we came here to change the game.
We'll see what happens.
Being passionate is good.
But
Don't get cocky!
I agree,
In fact alexa doesn't really mean much. But it's there haha
I respect your determination in that. I believe that the reality vs expectation with knock you back down in time but nobody gets anywhere in life by not trying and sometimes you have to ignore the negative comments.
We'll definitely try.
Just look at how big Hostinger International is. 000webhost; that's big as hell. This shows that it's not impossible to be profitable on the free web hosting industry. I plan on doing it even better.
At least you don't store things in unencrypted plain text :P
We don't, indeed
@fvsegarra, you've already received superb advice from both @seriesn and @Lee. Please keep it in mind when you plan your way forward from here.
If you weren't aware, @kujoe is still into free web hosting and runs aFreeCloud. From what I recall, he's primarily doing it as a way to give back to the community.
There's nothing wrong with going the other direction and doing free hosting primarily for moolah. But, as you already should have noticed, it's a completely different ballgame these days. Excluding complete VPSes, a person can easily purchase generous cPanel web hosting from a reputable company like BuyVM for only $5/yr.
Also, be weary with your numbers for AdSense. Especially with the increasing number of web browsers that are arriving with Ad-block software built-in and enabled by default. One doesn't need to look far to count how many media houses have closed shop within the last year.
You state that you have a super secret plan, and I don't have anything against you trying to keep it secret. Even if it's nothing spectacular. However, always remember the (older?) Google motto of "Don't be evil!".
Hi there!
No, we aren't evil at all, don't worry.
We tried to setup a sustainable business model to provide high quality free web hosting. All the suggestions here have definitely been extremely valuable, I 100% agree on that!
I love @kujoe's "cloud" joke... A long ladder haha
I hate how every brand new shitty company is "REVOLUTIONARY" "100% UNIQUE" "INCREDIBLE" "THE BEST" -- like let's face it, you're running a shitty site using a template you found online or bought, using cPanel -- how is that revolutionary or unique or the best or even remotely incredible? Like whoopty doo! You can download a theme, edit it's content, point DNS, and run a cli script to install cPanel. You get a fucking award!
/rant