While most of my experience is the paid web hosting sector, lately I have been reading up on free web hosting because of the free hosting company I started – 0bones.com. Now I thought that some requests for paid hosting plans were ridiculous, but if you want a real laugh, keep an eye on the hosting request forums at freewebspace.net

Free reseller hosting plans – I feel sorry for your customers!

When I first saw a request for a free reseller plan I almost died laughing. The guy wanted a reseller plan with something like 50GB disk space and 100GB of data transfer for free. Not only that, but he wanted to be able to provide his clients with shell access(say goodbye to that server!).

How could anyone feel safe knowing that their whole reseller business relies on the whims of the free hosting service that is providing it. I’m all for people trying to make some money off of selling something they got for free, but this is just over the line. Why?

Paid reseller plans are hard enough to offer – paid reseller plans are highly resource intensive…especially when the reseller starts adding more and more accounts to his reseller plan. Now, imagine being crammed onto a server with hundreds of free reseller plans on it.

Want to hear something even funnier? The guy asking for that ridiculous free reseller plan actually got a couple offers. While there were some strings attached, the plan was free none the less. I thought to myself…no way this is viable. 2 months later I checked out the company that offered him it and sure enough I was met with the ‘This page is not found’ error (the company went out of business).

Onto the idea of a free dedicated server.

Contrary to what you might think, a free dedicated server is actually more realistic than free reseller plans. In fact, I have provided many clients with free dedicated servers in the past and our trade off was very successful. I was able to procure many new customers by sponsoring large communities with dedicated servers. That being said, if you have nothing to offer the provider giving you the free server (traffic, branding, etc.) than forget about the idea of getting it free.

I remember seeing someone request a free dedicated server awhile back to host a bunch of game servers on. Needless to say, no one offered him anything. Why? Because what does the server provider get out of it? Maybe a few extra hits of untargeted traffic worth maybe $1 a month at max.

While the idea of getting a free reseller plan is just absurd (and a bad idea), the possibility of getting a free dedicated server is much greater. You just have to be able to provide the company giving you the free server something in return. Remember the saying – ‘nothing is free in this world’. Well it especially proves true with web hosting. No one gives away resources that cost money unless they profit from it somehow.