My Thoughts on Free Web Hosting

There is a lot of free web hosting companies coming up as well as a lot going down the drain. On the whole we are not worried about free web hosting companies. We do not compete with them and vice versa. We serve totally different niche of the market.

Free web hosting companies typically derived their income from

1. Banner or Text Advertising
2. Forum posts (which increases the popularity of their forum web site and hence increase their advertising potential)
3. Sponsored Advertising (Companies who put their banners for a monthly fees)
4. Totally no advertising free web hosting? How do they derive their income? Normally for such companies, they strive for intangibles. Either to increase their page rank and links and hence a higher position in the Search Engines or simply to promote their company brand and subsequently persuade users to sign on for paid hosting.

Users are normally individuals who don't care about the advertising or downtime. They are more for testing the waters. Hence do not compete with us as we are a very niche player and we concentrate only on the Singapore Web Hosting market.

Is Free Web Hosting Bad? You get what you pay for is typically the norm. A lot come and go, but some have been around for a long time and are quite good for beginners. In the end it is up to the users themselves to weigh the pros and cons.

I seldom come across Free Singapore Based Web Hosting Companies or Free Malaysia Based Web Hosting Companies. I for one think that it is due to the high costs of bandwidth here in the two countries. Typically Free Web Hosting Companies are in USA or maybe some of the European countries for eg UK, The Netherlands etc where the bandwidth prices drop a lot.

The Top ones are the Geocities (now part of Yahoo), Tripod (now part of Lycos) but I prefer some smaller ones that was around for a long time. Can't remember them though. I first started on Geocities, when they had those neighbourhoods where you vie for empty slots. Web space was pathetic, but that was fun when I first started. Knowing next to nothing, their tools really help me get the hang of it. There was quite a lot of neighbourly spirit then. Those were the fun days.......