Free hosting?

[brian]

From a business point of view, if you're serious about promoting a business on a website, you really need to pay for your own domain, hosting, and generally project that you are a competent business.

However, there seems to be an awfully large market for free hosting services.

I can see the benefits from a SEO point of view - lots of free sites offering free links.

And I can see if being useful for kids who want to set up a website but don't have a card to pay for services.

But is there any other real market in free hosting? Which market does it really focus on and server, or are there clear demographical sectors within free hosting customers?

[TWD_Tony]

I suppose it depends on your motives for offering FREE hosting, if you are just been a kind hearted samaritan then you need your bumps feeling and you will soon be flooded with support requests with nothing to show for it... On the other hand, if you were to place forced ads on sites that were hosted for FREE then you maybe onto a winner - it all depends on the revenue you could generate from the ads?
I don't think I would offer FREE hosting JUST for backlinks though...?

Originally Posted by brian

From a business point of view, if you're serious about promoting a business on a website, you really need to pay for your own domain, hosting, and generally project that you are a competent business.

However, there seems to be an awfully large market for free hosting services.

I can see the benefits from a SEO point of view - lots of free sites offering free links.

And I can see if being useful for kids who want to set up a website but don't have a card to pay for services.

But is there any other real market in free hosting? Which market does it really focus on and server, or are there clear demographical sectors within free hosting customers?

[brian]

I'm thinking more on the issue of free hosting from a customer point of view - certainly it's common in the SEO industry to set up content on free hosting just for the links.

As a business model, I should figure that free hosting works on an advertising revenue basis - but even then, I've no idea how easy it may be to make profitable.