How do you provide us with free hosting?

[abhijitvalluri]

It's been a while here for me. I have been really puzzled, since the day I joined,as to how you guys provide us with such a quality web hosting and that too for free. I noticed that many free hosts DON'T provide MySQL databases, email accounts and mailing lists, .htaccess, the ability to remove certain or all the php restrictions as you guys do with intermediate and advanced php configurations. Apart from that you guys give a decent webspace of upto 2,500 MB and upto 45 GB bandwidth/month and also you guys have a ad-free plan. In fact, I haven't seen so many plans for free hosting before. Other hosts provide only 1 free hosting plan and usually comes along with stupid pop-up banners and all. And also hopeless bandwidth and sometimes only some 10-100 MB webspace.

I am sure that you guys are THE BEST free web hosts in the world.

But how do you manage it? How do you pay for all the costs? I even heard that many ( or may be all) staff members are volunteers. How in the world you manage to keep 3 ad-free servers and 1 ad-enhanced server online and still get some money at the end of it (if indeed you earn money).

You guys must be the most effiecient of the lot.

I was just interested in the stats as to how many people you have with free hosting accounts, and how much it costs to keep each account alive.

By the way, I see you guys have 3 servers for ad-free only 1 for with ads. Do you guys prefer the ad-free service or is it that ads just don't generate so much revenue that they are pointless?

Hey, sorry for bragging about the point, but is your ad-free plan to stay or do you guys plan to remove or convert it to an ad-enhanced plan???

Sorry for a long post

Three cheers to X10hosting!!!!! :bowhs::bowhs::bowhs:

[Christopher]

We are all volunteers. The service is funded by the ad revenue and paid services. Anything else that still needs to be paid is paid by Corey.

We have 3 ad-free servers because it is much more popular than the ad-enhanced service.

The ad-free plan is going to stay.

[Chris Z]

According to our account panels, we have over 15,000 ad-free accounts and over 4,000 ad-enhanced accounts. We have been open for about four and a half years, so we've earned our good reputation.