I think it is getting interesting, what else other than capitalism can help with this problem?
Did my question lead to the creation of this topic? I know about this forum since 2019 and I’ve never seen topics dedicated to political discussion here until today.
I merged messages about what should be provided for free and discussions about capitalism to a central topic in the Informal category. Sorry for the mess. Please carry on.
As a business owner, I can tell you: it doesn’t work like that.
Suppose a company pays 30% profit tax. So for every $100 of profit, the company would have to pay $30 in taxes. But suppose for every $100 in revenue, the company has $80 in expenses, meaning there is a $20 profit margin.
If the company would have to pay tax on their revenue, they would have to pay $30 of tax on $20 of profit. That makes no sense, and would make it impossible for a business to exist unless their margins were extremely high to begin with.
That’s why companies are taxes on profit. Meaning they only have to pay 30% tax on the $20 of profit. So the company pays $6 in profit and keeps $14.
Similar story with VAT. Suppose there is 20% VAT. The company has to pay 20% VAT on the $80 they spend, so that’s $16 in VAT. To their customers, they charge 20% VAT too, which is $20 on the $100 revenue. The company can claim back the $16 on VAT they pay. But it’s not free money, because they have to give $20 in VAT to the government in return.
In all cases described, the company gets money back and claim deductibles, so they “get money from the government”. But in the end the company still contributes $10 to tax for the $14 they get to keep. So to say that the taxpayer is lining company pockets is ridiculous as the company is a taxpayer itself.
International mega corporations can do jump through all kinds of sophisticated tax evasion hoops to reduce their taxes to near zero. I don’t think that’s fair either. But InfinityFree isn’t an international mega corporation.
SMBs don’t have this luxury. SMBs just have to follow the tax regulation of their country, which means they have to pay taxes, just like you do.
I can’t get infinite free money from the government. If you can, then just print some money and pay for your hosting if it’s all the same to you.
ARGH! @ this thread
Anything can get political at some point 
I was referring to non profits and charity revenue, not commercial businesses for clarification…
I think it is just people moving stuff off other threads, I will always maintain that free plans should be entitled to exactly the same standards as those that pay… Why do I think that?? Probably because I run a voluntary organisation, I would hate my volunteers to turn up and think they could do a worse job because they weren’t getting paid for it… Of course people are free to disagree with me, nobody wants an echo chamber fo they…
If you guys could somehow prove to agencies that fund such things that you were providing social gain, reducing digital exclusion, empowering people (say an organisation is a community of people and they somehow get an improved free plan as they are a legitimate organisation that can prove it, with a history of delivery of projects etc) etc, then such agencies will fund organisations and businesses to provide such services…
If you wanted to run charity, then run your charity. But you being a non-profit doesn’t mean that everyone should run non-profit.
But admin was clear: we are a bussiness not a charity.
Sorry to say, but wars are making countries losing money all the time these days, if they ever decided to start one. No one wanted to start a war unless they have a good reason and willing to spend a lot of money on weapon, soldiers, food, etc.
And most importantly, after spending all these money you hardly get something after defeating your enemy. The world are so saturated.
So, you hate capitalism? Then please think something different, some fully developed thinking, publish your book, not just yelling “Free should be equal to paid” here in some really small forum.
Will communism be your answer? As a chinese I can tell you NO. (I might get myself into trouble lol)
Communism’s final goal looks excatly likes your goal. However, it is still under its early stage, and simply cannot sustain itself.
When PRC first founded we did try to achieve “pure communism”. Results? Millions of people died. Big economical fault. No one wanted to work. The country almost stopped its life here.
These days China went into some “special communism” that involves some of captalism (though my gov deny it). The sad thing? Captalism. Good thing? It works. It WORKS. And even this, China of today are still flooded with negative things / emotion. Look at the Internet: They block things. People are always dumping their anger without even a reason (looks like you however). Arguments that looks like the ones in kindergarten over everywhere. Look at the society. Bureau corruption happens everywhere. People complaining about everything.
Is this the society you wanted? Obiviously not. Again, if you hate captalism then please come up with something new and full, (or fix communism) and be good enough to take place of these 90%+ captalism.
Please understand the situation,
InfinityFree is a business, and it is here to earn money, which your point does not work like that.
Even if it does, InfinityFree does not have the infrastructure to provide you the things you want.
In any way, you are still Hosting for free, which I believe it’s enough for your non-profit company.
Communism is just a creation of the secret societies, as is fascism… Hagelian dialectics used to bring about change…Far left and far right both have the same outcome… One thing is for sure, millions of humans drooling over a worthless made up currency is not the answer in my view…
Yes, I accept that, but my point to Admin about charity scams and expenses fraud is also just as valid… That is how the charities and non profits he was alluding to can manifest turnover in the way he described… It doesn’t matter how much people have of something that is worthless, what is 100,000 x 0??
What about if all of your servers burned down in a fire, would everybody hosting with you lose everything, if you have no backups whatsoever… I can’t think how people paying you would feel about that… I am surprised there are not backups of every single account you guys host… Just a simple ISO image of every drive, that is why I asked, people that I know that host recreationally for family projects on their servers advised me to ask or I wouldn’t have done… Then if you guys did have an event you could just replace all of the files… Sounds like good practice to me…
I’m sorry, I really did mean to stay out of this conversation, but I am going to butt in to address one point you made.
Regarding the fire scenario. First of all, iFastNet only has one data center, so the backups would be stored in the same building, meaning that they would burn down with the rest of the place (Which would not help people at all)
Secondly, free hosting would probably be done for, as the cost to rebuild would be way more then what was ever made with the free plan in the first place. Sure, it would be telling customers good bye quite rudely, but it’s a fire, and you chose a free host with one data center (Hint hint, I don’t know of a single free host that splits your data across multiple data centers, if they do have more then one).
Then please provide us the drives to store all of these, thank you.
That’s a MASSIVE amount of data, (as well as disks) you might not realized.
Also, there’s no point in yelling this backup thing here — We do not control the servers and please yell here: ifastnet.com thank you!
I don’t know why you always use the word us, you are just a forum user like me and are in no way part of the hosting team?? You are no different to me, yet you want to try and differetiate between us?? Why would you do that?? I find it quite strange…
Take the money of the profits they are making, re - invest in the business… Like I said, I find it very strange that Infinity Free (I won’t say you, are not part of them) do not protect the data of the customers by way of backups…
Are there backups for paid accounts??
Yes. Premium hosting provides backups.
I thought so… So there is one, you are just trying to charge me for it… I understand…
So now we have established that there is a backup, you guys are just holding it to ransom, how do we move forward now that the truth has been established?? I am not going to pay you for the backup, so what other options are available to me??
Thanks,
Paul