We provide unlimited disk space and bandwidth with a fair usage policy, as is the case with all hosting providers and plans show provide unlimited disk space and bandwidth. We do not provide fully unlimited hosting, nor did we ever intend to imply such a thing.
There are many, many limitations which they don’t list on their plans page. This is very obvious when looking at their forum.
This is the first topic they pinned on their forum. They have much more strict inode limits and MySQL restrictions than we do, and they also don’t list these on their plans page:
https://www.000webhost.com/forum/t/website-limitations-free-plans/179628
Additionally, 000webhost does things like advertising “Almost endless 300 MB disk space”. You could argue that they are honest because they have a hard disk usage cap, but also that they are misleading people by making it seem that the quite meager 300 MB disk space could be considered as good as “endless”.
I appreciate your confidence in our abilities, but I’m afraid they are a bit too optimistic.
Here are some of the issues I see with your idea:
- The free hosting infrastructure is funded in large part by premium hosting sales. If we make free hosting as good as premium hosting, what incentive would people have to upgrade?
- AdSense has quite harsh content requirements. On our own website and panel, we control the content so we can make sure it’s safe. On customer websites, this is much harder to do. Just installing AdSense ads everywhere would cause Google to catch on quickly and cut us off, and…
- Manually reviewing websites to make sure they are safe would take way, way too much time, and doesn’t guarantee that people don’t add prohibited content later on.
- Almost all free hosting providers don’t put ads (or claim to not put ads) on their customers’ websites. Many people would not accept free hosting with ads anymore, even if the provider claims it’s faster, more reliable and more powerful than all other free hosting.
- Hybrid plans don’t work. If people pay money to a host, they expect premium quality, not free hosting with a few extra bits, not matter how hard you slap them in the face with this fact in the purchase procedure.
- iFastNet’s premium hosting goes as low as $19.99 per year. Any hybrid plan would have to undercut this (because why else would you upgrade to premium hosting). And if you do that, then transaction fees and other overhead costs basically eat up all possible revenue.
I do sometimes look with envy at what providers like Heroku can do: a freemium service with quite expensive paid addons (compared to the price of a web hosting account). But with fully fledged premium hosting being comparatively cheap, applying this business model to web hosting is basically cheating people out of money by nickle-diming them with extras.
You wouldn’t believe how many people have tried to copy us already. Brands which carbon copy others don’t become one of the biggest free hosting brands in the world.
But we still provide a free website hosting service, and our service has many of the common characteristics of free web hosting services.