How do Free Hosting Provider actually survive?

[llegent]

Helo everybody. I am sure some of you have been aware of mushrooming of free hosting providers all over internet. In kost cases, these free hosting providers only require either forum posting or displaying their ads.

It keeps me thinking, is the revenue generated from those ads really sufficient for them to maintain their operation?? What about those which only required forum posting (or Post to Host) ? How could they be able to last for years? Yup, there are some which actually last for years!

What's the secret behind their "success"? any ideas?

[taiarain]

I'm actually interested in learning about this business model, myself.

Taia

[llegent]

Ok guys, instead of me keep wondering about it, I have set it up and start to offer free hosting myself. So far the progress has been good. And members response in signing up accounts has been encouraging.

At the moment, I am not earning from it yet. Fortunately I have a full time job to support it. Let's see how far it will go!

[taiarain]

Now that you're into it, can you tell us how to generate an income doing it?

Taia

[llegent]

Ok, my service is up and running for about just 1month. Before that, I get my own server and play around with the WHM and other admin application panel just to get a feel of them in case I need to perform some basic trouble shooting.

Well, at the moment, I honestly have yet to earn a good amount via this yet. I still have to work hard to boost up the members sign up rate, and help them to build their sites up as soon. I foresee that only when the overall traffic get large, I'll then be able to start seeing the potential return.

Still working on it...

[taiarain]

What is it that generates income for you, though? Is it through ad revenue?

Taia

[llegent]

Yup, like most free hosting provider, ads revenue is the main income source. But as my network is still small with about 250 active members/sites out of 450accounts in my server, the monthly unique visitors is only about 5k+ with pageviews of about 40k only.

As the traffic is considered small, I am exploring other alternatives to generate some revenue, eg direct advertising purchase from all interested party ( banner display across the whole network ). Well, I do understand that my traffic is coming from all countries and not really concentrates from US based, I could not be asking for a high rate from advertisers. Mostly I think about $20/month will be reasonable.

By the way, anyone interested?? I could provide the stats extract from my SEDO etracker account for the traffic for the month of July'06.