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I’m Building a Free Hosting Platform – Looking for Honest Feedback Before Launch
Hey everyone,
I’m currently developing a free hosting platform designed to let users quickly create and manage their own hosting accounts with minimal friction. The goal is to make something genuinely useful for beginners, developers, and small projects—without the usual barriers.
Before I take this any further, I’d really like to get real feedback from people who understand hosting and real-world usage.
A few things I’d love your input on:
What would make you actually use a platform like this?
What limits would feel fair for a free plan? (storage, bandwidth, etc.)
What features are absolutely essential?
What would immediately turn you away from using it?
Any ideas on how this could evolve into something sustainable long-term?
One important note: this platform will have a strict zero-tolerance policy for abuse (spam, phishing, illegal content, etc.). The goal is to build something clean, stable, and actually usable—not another platform that gets flooded with garbage.
I’m still in the development phase, so your feedback can directly shape how this turns out.
Appreciate any honest thoughts
Comments
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/im-building-a-free-hosting-platform-looking-for-honest-feedback-before-launch.1812411/
Noice. Happy building. September 1st is due?
The owner of that thread on the forum is also me. I just copied and pasted it because I was too lazy to write it again 🙂
I’m probably planning to launch it sometime between May 15 and May 30. Until then, I’d love to hear your suggestions.
I preffer to buy a hosting for year at price of big mac. Not a fan of free hosting...
Always free hosting comes with bad clients. Good luck handling tons of abuses.
Another user mentioned something similar before. However, I’m a student living in Turkey, and selling hosting here is really difficult. Setting up a company, dealing with accounting costs, taxes (20%), and requirements like e-invoicing are quite challenging for a student like me.
My honest opinion.. don't do free hosting, this is not a start for a future premium service. Imagine police knocking on your door because one MJJ hosted some bad pictures on your sever. Or having your server seized and suddenly all your "clients" have their website down..
Grab some money and start a propper "company". Buy a cheap reseller from a reputable company and try to get some from this. Slow grow is the healtiest grow.
tip: find a forgiving server provider, as you will have to deal with many abuse tickets. Many vps/servers providers have also zero abuse tollerance canceling your whole server and thus losing all your customers data and websites...
It being an AI vibe coded platform by a single person without the knowledge of properly reviewing and curating it.
Biggest issue you’ll have:
Abuse. Some of the nastiest kind you can imagine, especially on free. Do not underestimate this.
Unless you own the IP space and hardware/colo, expect whoever is hosting you to likely also eventually kick you out over rampant abuse problems.
If you’re prepared for that or have some kind of plan, I think it’s otherwise noble and a fantastic way to build skills and knowledge.
It has to be clear your motivation and how this will be funded and resourced.
Do you plan to fully support IPv9?
No
The server traffic will be routed through the Tor network. In other words, all API requests and similar actions performed by users within the website will go through the Tor network. The server’s IP address will only be used for domain binding. Therefore, I don’t think it will cause any major issues.
1) stop trashing the tor network for profit
2) your users will endlessly bitch about how nothing works and no api calls work and their wordpress page takes 30 seconds to load
3) your server's IP will still be taken down for a dozen phishing reports in the span of an hour while you are sleeping
lack of ipv6
lack of ssh
lack of modern php such as 8.5
@yoursunny, important information.
Expectation: you'll create a happy place where everybody is nice to everyone else and helps each other solve their problems
Reality: nobody will use your service except for malware hosting and phishing sites. You'll be bombarded with DMCA notices and your provider will cancel your server and you'll come back here and make a hate thread.
Just save yourself the heartache and the dollars, and don't bother.
I offered free hosting for more than a year. You can still check it out - https://owrbit.com/free-web-hosting . I think paid hosting prices are already too low. My monthly orders are more than my till date orders of free hosting.
I just kept it live, in case someone actually needs it.
That’s a very realistic and reasonable perspective. But I’m not new to this field. I’m fully aware that a large portion of the service could be misused, and I know I’ll have to deal with a lot of DMCA and abuse reports. I also understand there’s a real risk the provider might suspend the server.
Still, if all of that happens, I’ll simply say this: “At least I tried. I learned what I needed to learn. Now it’s time to build something better.”
Looks good. I’ll take a closer look when I have some time 👍
Will it be better or different than Neocities? https://neocities.org/
Neocities offers 1GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth on its free plan.
In comparison, we provide 5GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited database storage, and unlimited inodes.
1GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth seems like a lot to me, for most people/sites.
That seems pretty generous. Seems like a lot to manage. How will you make it sustainable, from a monetary perspective?
I am very leary of "unlimited" -- it can get you into a lot of trouble. Just ask Backblaze, and their products aren't free!
I’ve received a lot of similar feedback to yours, expressing concerns that offering some features for free can lead to trust and sustainability issues. Because of that, I’ll be reviewing the “unlimited” features and making necessary adjustments where needed.
Thank you for your response and for sharing your perspective.
I don't think there is that much of a casual (as in interested but not willing to pay at least a couple cents) enthusiast crowd around web stuff anymore in 2026. The mentioned neocities probably covers the biggest portion of what is left. Personal website, hell even blog isn't much of thing anymore these days and kids don't line up to learn PHP either. To those left bigger specs won't make a ton of difference and lets face it you won't be able to support even a handful of accounts actually pushing unlimited/unmetered/unwhatever anyways.
What is left is pretty much people looking for quick throwaway pages without a paper trail jumping on in hopes underdeveloped abuse processes and undetected loopholes will yield them a usable window to pull off whatever they are looking to pull off.
If your goal is to supply people with some kind of base to start from you might want to at least think of some way to screen signups for seriousness or start building some community around your project which would deter potential drive by clients. I figure that isn't really what you were thinking of but if you just hand out accounts on the basis of "plis giv account sir" you will get a lot of garbage and a lot of headaches to you and your 5 honest clients.
ask yourself who uses free hosting in 2026, then ask yourself if you really want to deal with those people.
Reliability and a history of competence.
FUP. Whatever you can reasonably provide.
SSH access.
Finding out that it was created by a nobody with no plan advertising on a script kiddie forum, or finding out that it was vibe coded.
Experience.
Seriously. Experience. You need to start with something smaller. Start hosting some of your own websites (without vibe coding them). Then provide free servers to friends and people you have carefully chosen. Gradually expand access as you get used to it.
Study the frameworks, study networking, learn about the industry. Do some CTFs to improve your security skills. Set up a variety of applications so you learn how to troubleshoot. Learn how to automate server deployment. Learn how to manage disks. Learn SQL until you understand it well enough to fix a database manually when something goes wrong. Learn how to do performance profiling (no need to get so deep that you're measuring cache hit rate and IPC, but at least understand what your bottlenecks are).
If you can't answer "yes, absolutely" or at least "I could figure it out easily enough" to all the above questions, then you aren't ready yet.
Don't do that. It won't protect you from abuse reports that way, and it will slow everything down. If you want to host onion services specifically, go ahead, but don't abuse Tor this way.
If you really need to make heavy use of Tor, at least run a few relays (not in Germany or the Netherlands, as those regions are oversaturated) to give back to the network.