Starting the free service is easy, but making it profitable is difficult. As I mentioned in previous article, starting free WordPress hosting, or starting free web proxy, does not need any fancy scripts and tools. But how many people do make meaningful profit?
Before you start to provide free web services, it is important to realize you have enough fund to pay your servers, your employees (if any) and yourself. Usually, it may take at least 3-6 months for you to get substantial revenues from your free hosting services; so be prepared for the hard time for the first a few months.
To generate generate revenue from your free hosting services, you have several options:
This could be very difficult for beginners as you do not have enough traffic. The advantage of this option is that you have full control of ads to be shown on your sites and you can set your price based on CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click). The main disadvantage is that it is hard to sell!
You need install some software to track your ad campaigns. OpenX(formally PhpAdsNew) is an excellent ad server package. It is free, powerful and well documented. The shortcoming is that you may spend some time to integrate it with a shopping cart. You only need the open source version unless you have lot cash to burn.
This is more suitable when you have sizable user bases. You can provide more plugins, more templates, or more bandwidth, or more features, or ad -removal, as upgrades. If your service is good and stable, you should get about 1-2% upgraders.
This is used by most providers nowadays. It is important to understand that the quality of these services varies largely and you may have little control of the ads to be shown on your sites. Although some providers allow you to exclude certain ads; it is usually not very useful. You should also understand most providers pay you on net-30 or net-60 days; it means you have to wait 30-60 days to receive your payment.
Here I give you some examples that suitable for free hosting providers.
Of course, there are some other ways to earn money from your free hosting services. I will discuss them (affiliate marketing ads, paid links, and paid posts) in a later article.
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Great. Thank you for this Simon. :-)
Hi Rochelle, thank you for passing by. Your blog is very nice. But why did you put under company website? It would better (more authority) if it was under an independent domain name. Just my 2 cents.
Reached your blog through Yahoo. You already know I am signing up to your feed.
Hi Bobbie, what happened to your blog? It is not accessible.
Very nice info, i wanted to start free hosting website , and i thought of showing adsense in that but after reading your blog i got confusion, my web site is mainly for schools can create there own sites, plz give some idea with some example
TQ