I was answering in a webmaster forums to a topic created by a prospective forum owner who wanted to know about ways to get FREE forum hosting. I replied with some information and this made me think about an article for us here too.

Weird as it might seem, this entire project was started in the winter of 2004 ON A FREE subdomain. My first article (that’s no longer available, since I changed my opinions) was about FREE hosting and why we shouldn’t bother with a paid solution.

Back then the free hosting was a good idea, it did have some pros for this: you can start your career and not worry about succeeding, you can experiment at will for free etc. The cons in time showed their ugly face though: most of the time you will work hard, want to move and then lose PR and traffic, there are all kinds of limitations, most of the time free hosting is not quality etc.

Now I have realized something more: FREE is NOT FREE.

Before we discuss about what you “pay” for free hosting, let’s see how much you’d pay for a normal host: your .com (or another extension) domain is not more than 10-12 USD/year. A hosting plan for a small starting site (you don’t need more than 200 MB space and 2 GB bandwidth) would be 3-5 USD/month. There can be some discounted prices too, that would lower your total costs even more. Let’s say that with the hosting and domain name we’d discuss about 4 USD (on average) per month. It’s not really the end of the world.

And now many would say: OK, but I get these for free. Let’s see how you still “pay” for these.

1. you post on some forums to get free hosting. There are plans of posting count you have to achieve and you’ll be alloted some space and bandwidth. Some of these programs might work, but it’s most likely that such sites fail in time. You need to search for some reviews on the quality and tenure. On paidforumposts.info we pay our editors 0.20 USD/message. If you post more than 20 messages a month, you’re already working more than the 4 USD/month value you’d pay for a normal hosting (plus a domain, which free hosting won’t provide)

2. you show ads from their campaigns. Some free hosts cover their server costs with Adsense campaigns or from other advertisers. Some might advertise themselves on your site. These banners (most of the time big ones) are placed automatically in the header (the most proeminent place). For an already developing site, your header place could monetize way better. Instead of getting 20-50 USD/month from your own private advertisers, you keep your headers occupied for a 4 USD value host.

Anyway you’d take this, in order for someone to offer you free hosting, that someone needs to find ways to monetize this. All these ways involve your time and/or ad space. For a very small site, this might not be such an issue, but the moment you start getting a bit of a traffic the value YOU LOSE is huge as compared to 4 USD/month you “win” by getting a free hosted account. Now tell me this is good business.