From the SelectedWorks of Umakant Mishra February, 2012 Why is it Difficult to Find a Good Free Web Host Umakant Mishra Available at: http://works.bepress.com/umakant_mishra/102/
Why is it difficult to find a Good Free Web Host? Umakant Mishra Bangalore, India http://umakantm.blogspot.in Contents 1. Introduction...1 2. What is a good free host...2 3. Possible business model for free hosting...3 4. Why is it difficult to find a good free host...4 4.1 The genuine free hosts cannot spend money for advertisements...4 4.2 Hosting business in the name of free hosting...5 4.3 Deceptive advertisements by hosting businessmen...5 4.4 Fake hosting evaluators...6 5. Heliohost- An example of good Free Host...7 6. Conclusion...8 7. Reference:...8 1. Introduction Many people believe that there is nothing available free in this world. When water is not available free how can you get web hosting for free? Every free hosting must be having a hidden business agenda behind its so-called free hosting plans. The people who say so are logical but not true. Surprisingly, there are some good free hosts who provide real free hosting having all advanced features no worse than any paid hosting. Some readers may either not believe or get surprised to hear about real free hosting. But we must accept the fact that there are many such things available free in this world of technology. How do you get free email services from Google, Yahoo etc.? (They may be earning from advertisements or other sources, but we get the email free). How do Google maps, Wikimapia etc. provide free maps worth millions? How do the blogging sites provide free blogging? How do you get Linux operating system free? How do you get thousands of powerful software under GNU license free? Interestingly the conventional business logic does not hold good in all these cases. There are many things available free on Internet.
The only thing bad with free hosting is that it is difficult to find a good free host. As Free Hosting is a very attractive term you will find thousands of advertisements offering various types of free hosting. Although advertisements are many, the actual free hosts are very less. Most of those so-called free hosting providers have different business plans and hidden intentions behind their limited and conditional free hosting and are often not the right free host that you are actually looking for. 2. What is a good free host A good free host should have all the good features of a paid host and provide all those facilities that a paid host provides. It should not put any unreasonable conditions on the customer and should not charge any money for any of these facilities. Let s see what a good free host should provide to us. - Should provide enough hosting space, say, 500 MB or more. - Should provide enough data transfer, say, 1 GB per month or more - Should provide good hardware for faster execution - The server should have minimum downtime - Should provide good connection speed for faster serving of web pages - Should provide domain hosting, sub-domain hosting, add on domains, domain parking and domain management facilities. - Should provide email service (POP3, IMAP etc.) and allow the customer to create email users. - Should allow FTP for file uploading, additionally should provide high performance web based file management interfaces. - Should provide all popular and necessary web programming languages. (Depending on hosting platform, the user may need ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl, Python, C#, Coldfusion, Java, Ruby on Rails etc.) - Should provide database support, if not paid databases like MS-SQL at least free databases like MySQL.
- Should provide powerful control panel, such as Plesk control panel on MS Windows or cpanel on Unix. - Should not force their banners, advertisements or pop-ups on the customer s site. - Should allow the customers to put their ads. - Should provide a reasonably long term service and should not close down abruptly. - Should provide some user support (say through email) when necessary. It is important to note that we should not expect certain things like unlimited space, unlimited data transfer, 24x7 support etc. from a free host. These are all absurd expectations and are hardly available even from the paid servers. Most highly paid servers who claim to be providing these features are even cheating. 3. Possible business model for free hosting Now the question arises how the free hosting companies earn to provide these services. If they don t put their advertisements on customers site or don t force customers to buy other products, or don t cheat customers to extract money through different means, then how do they manage to invest so much of money in their free-hosting venture? What is the objective of free hosting without any benefit? Let me try to address this question. - Not everybody do everything for money. There are thousands of very high skilled programmers who work free software under GNU license. Similarly, there can be some hobbyists who like to provide free hosting services. - Many web-hosting and other computer related companies have to upgrade their hardware very fast in order to compete with the growing challenge. The obsolete hardware, which was used till yesterday, has no price in the market although they are fully functional. That hardware can be well utilized for such purposes. - Many powerful Operating Systems, like Linux, are free; powerful web servers, like Apache, are free; powerful databases like MySQL and PostgreSql are free. Thus Apache, PHP and MySQL on Unix Platform create a powerful combination, which are totally free for hosting purposes. - If a hosting organization or training organization wants to train people on hosting, they can be well utilized for managing free hosting servers, where they can afford to make some mistake, as there is no commitment for uptime. - Although the free hosts don t force advertisements on the clients site, the client may happily put a link to the hosting site, which increases the free hosts credibility. For example in my case, I do not like free hosts to put
their advertisement on my site, but I have put courtesy links to the hosting servers in all my free websites. - Donation is a potential source of income for the free hosting services. Although I am not sure whether the amount of donations are potentially enough to run the expenses, but it can certainly be considered as an incentive in such a self-less venture. Thus if a person knows how to manage a server and gets free hardware, obsolete for commercial use but good enough for standard use, then the only thing he needs is an internet connection to set up a hosting environment, almost without any explicit investment. 4. Why is it difficult to find a good free host The worst problem of good free hosts is that they are difficult to find. You will find thousands of advertisements leading to various web hosts- but hardly any of them leads to a good free host. Some reasons are obvious while some other reasons are unbelievable. 4.1 The genuine free hosts cannot spend money for advertisements As we saw above, a hosting provider has to take care of a lot of things, which needs lot of time, technical knowledge and investments. As a true free host has no way to earn from free hosting, we cannot expect it to spend further money, effort and time to make commercial advertisements to attract clients to use its free hosting services. The genuine free hosting services can be better provided by hobbyists and not by businessmen.
4.2 Hosting business in the name of free hosting As the concept of free hosting sounds very attractive, the people in hosting business strategically utilize this term to attract customers to sell their paid hosting schemes. They provide various limited and conditional free hosting schemes, which attract customers who subsequently buy their paid hosting schemes and other products. Some of these free hosting schemes may look like: - First three months free hosting then paid hosting - Three months free in one year paid hosting - 100 MB space for free hosting, beyond that premium hosting - 500 MB data transfer free, buy premium account for more data transfer - Limited free hosting accompanied with paid domain name - One database free, for more databases buy premium account - Many restrictions in free hosting, such as, file size limitations, control panel, FTP, email and other limitations etc. Buy premium account for full features. - Forced advertisements in free hosting, no forced advertisement in premium hosting - Free hosting available for personal websites, buy premium hosting for commercial websites. - No guarantee of uptime and no user support in free hosting, buy premium hosting for user support. None of the above types of free hosting are actually free hosting. They all intend to sell various hosting products in the name of free hosting. They provide free hosting because from their experience they know that a good percentage of their limited and conditional free hosting customers will sooner or later be converted to premium hosting. 4.3 Deceptive advertisements by hosting businessmen As we discussed above the people in hosting business try to attract customers in the name of free hosting. As there is a cutthroat competition between the hosting providers, all of them want to make some free hosting schemes and attract the customers in the name of free hosting. However, all these schemes are very limited and conditional free hosting and intended to trap the customers. Currently the Internet is full of advertisements on free hosting almost all of which are limited and conditional free hosting provided by the paid hosting providers. As a result, when a person gives a search on free hosting he gets a list of all these commercial hosting agencies, which does not include any good free host.
Many such deceptive advertisements on free hosting strategically include: (1) Links to some free hosts which look very attractive but physically don t exist, (2) Links to some pages which contain another list of free hosts, (3) Some links leading to some really bad free hosts and (4) Some links to their intended paid hosts (who strategically provide some kind of limited free hosting). Their list is carefully prepared with an advertisement strategy to: (1) Distantiate the visitors from actual or good free hosts (2) To display the names of intended paid hosts again and again when the user is clicking on the links and moving from one list to another. (3) If the visitor chooses one of the displayed (really bad) free hosts, then he is guaranteed to be frustrated and loose faith in the concept of free hosting. When a person will try a couple of such bad free hosting servers he will eventually opt for a paid hosting. 4.4 Fake hosting evaluators There are many hosting evaluators in the market with an intention to (mis)guide the consumers. These evaluators are either the same agencies having hosting business or sponsored by the agencies running hosting business. They pretend themselves to be unbiased evaluators but in practice fully biased towards their clients who pay them money. These fake evaluators follow all tricks to appear to be genuine evaluators and convince visitors that the servers they recommend are the best. While the visitors think that they are looking at evaluation reports, actually they are browsing through a kind of sophisticated advertisements.
Some hosting providers and hosting evaluators adopt the strategy of accepting and displaying user feedback to popularize their sites. However, a deeper analysis will show you that they carefully manipulate those user feedbacks in order to bias the visitors towards their intended hosts. Genuine user feedback Manipulation 1 Negative comments against bad - free hosts (such hosts are intentionally included in the list) 2 Negative comments against their sponsoring hosts Either not publish or delete such entries in due course 3 - The sponsoring hosts and the evaluators themselves will enter a lot of positive comments for the intended hosts. The whole scenario is framed in such a manner that the innocent visitors believe that they are going through the real feedbacks posted by genuine users. But in reality they get carried by those manipulated feedbacks. Benjamin s website http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com exposes many such fake evaluators. 5. Heliohost- An example of good Free Host I tried to evaluate a large number of free hosting servers. Out of around 100 hosting services, I found that half of them cannot just be used as they provide very limited hosting or put too many unacceptable conditions or conditions to pay for something else etc. Out of the free hosts I evaluated I found many of them don t provide domain hosting, some don t provide emailing; some don t provide good interfaces etc. Only 5-6 free hosts provide full-fledged usable hosting. The best in my evaluation is heliohost.org, which provides all the features provided by any paid host. 500Mb space (it is enough to host any standard website) Unlimited Bandwidth. Support for CGI, SSI, FrontPage Extensions, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails ASP.NET 3.5 with VB.NET support cpanel with complete features File uploading with FTP, WebDAV and advanced File Manager Fantastico and Softaculous installer. Unlimited addon domains, parking domains and sub-domains Unlimited POP3 Email accounts Statistics, error logs, raw logs Cron jobs, custom error pages, SSL Unlimited MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
6. Conclusion Although free hosting and paid hosting are the same in terms of features and technology, they are very different in terms of their business model and objectives. A genuine free hosting provider, unlike commercial hosting providers, cannot spend money on commercial advertisements. Besides, it may not be evaluated impartially by the commercial evaluators. Hence, a good free host is less likely to appear in a search result. Although there is no direct competition between free hosting providers and paid hosting providers, a lot of problems and confusions are created by a third and larger group of people in hosting business who provide conditional and limited free hosting to misguide customers and divert towards their paid hosting business. This article illustrates how the advertisements on free hosts are deceptive, the evaluations are fake, and the feedbacks are manipulated. As the search engines cannot differentiate between good and bad free hosts, it is likely that you will get a search result of free hosts which are more discussed or more advertised and not necessarily better. Now the question arises how to find a good free host. But this question is as difficult to answer as how to find a good person. Practically you have to start searching through search engines, but ultimately you may have to do your own testing and evaluations. Searching a good free host is as difficult as searching a diamond in the coalmine. 7. Reference: 1. Umakant Mishra, Dirty tricks played by Domain Registrars, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1974978 2. Umakant Mishra, Parameters of evaluating Free hosting Solutions, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2007900 3. Umakant Mishra, Dirty tricks played by Web Hosting Agencies, http://freejournal.heliohost.org/freejournal/?/articles/2011/12/22/dirty-tricksplayed-by-the-web-hosting-companies.html 4. Benjamin, Exposing Hosting Companies and Hosting Reviews, http://hostingreviews-exposed.com/