subject: How Do Free Web Hosting Make Money Off Of You? [print this page] If they are giving you free hard drive space, free bandwidth and even free services like e-mail, then how do they bring in cash to keep the servers running? One of the most common questions with free web hosting is how do those companies make money off of you?
There are several ways they can make money off of you if you choose free web hosting, but the three most common are advertising, referrals and resell hosting.
Advertising is by far the most common way for a free web host to make money off of your website. By selling online advertising on the very website you create through them, they can bring in money based on pay-per-click. Whenever someone clicks on an ad on your website, a few cents goes to the hosting service. If they have 10,000 websites being hosted for free, and each website has one person click on it each day and are paid two cents, then the company is bringing in $200 per day.
The more traffic a website gets, the more it costs to run that website for the web hosting service, and therefore the additional ad impressions that can be clicked for money. Most companies do not use this method because some ads will be based on what is on the users website. If the ads are advertising something competing with what is being sold on the website, then it is not a good business scenario.
Referrals use viral marketing by having a user of the free web hosting getting special offers based on how many friends they refer to the service. The more users who have websites through the company, the more potential ad revenue they bring in. If the free web host company offers paid web hosting as well, then they can have incentives for free users who bring in friends that buy hosting, thereby covering costs.
Resell hosting is when a hosting service sells space and bandwidth to a third party so they can sell it to someone else. This is not as commonly used but it is becoming increasingly popular for free web hosts to support themselves by renting out their servers.
The cost to pay for your web hosting is usually as low as $9.99 per month and in many ways is worth the cost when compared with the ads you have to put up with when you have a website on a free web hosting server.
