Free hosting business model
 

I have seen free hosting providers grow their business into pretty big companies, how come?
I understand their business model is to convert users into paying members, but who would prefer getting paid plan at free hosting proivider (subconsciously it says "not quality") instead of reputable host?

bumparoo.

Freemium is the concept...
limited disk space, limited dbs, limited email accounts.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

Am I wrong?

They don't necessary need to be bad hosting companies/services. They have a different business model.

Some people might start using it to create basic pages and after... "well... they were nice to me... I will keep using them.. lets pay... and that way I dont need to move all my shits to a new host..."

I guess that webhosting has a HUGE retention rate....

Peace

You can count number of quality free hosts on fingers,i'v seen billions of them going out of business.Just check archives on freewebhostingtalk.com .Some of them succeeded by offering paid hosting but i dont know how they still manage it as most of free host users probaly never convert to paid.I know one which simply killed their free accounts and if you wanted to stay you had to pay.And there was one losser on gfy which was offering free accounts here and then he was surprised how nobody care about paid packages.

Who is the biggest free hosts?

Probably facebook, twitter, tumblr.

The key to free host is what they offer.

http://pornlivenews.com/ still seems to be going.

The ones that went were probably not that good.

Looks like you have no idea what we are talking about and what is a free host.... :helpme
http://hostinger.com as an example. Not facebook, not twitter, not tumblr, not pornlivenews is what thsi threads is about.

The free hosting model can still be successful (and profitable) if you know what you`re doing (and I`m not referring to upgrades to a paid host).

What are you referring to then?

Free hosting space but with additional features (so not just x amount of space and x amount of bandwidth). The additional features are financed through ads on the free host pages.

Yeah, this one is pretty common, but for instance the one I posted above (hostinger) they do not have any ads and they provide good features for free + they even pay around $1 per free referal. And they expanded pretty nicely, somehow.

Servers are dirt cheap my friend and I would think that they are working on the volume game (i.e 100`s of freebie sign-ups every day and a 0. % sign-up for the premium/business/VPS plans after a period of time). I would think they also earn a little money on the 404 traffic (dead/inactive accounts)

As you say though, plenty does appear to be on offer in terms of allowances/features etc.