I don’t get it. Free webhosting, no ads, specs that seem comparable to pay sites, even tech support! Yet, mysteriously absent is any explanation of why they are doing this, or how they are supporting this business model. Anyone know?
Wow, AND free domain name? Eg… www.whatever-name-you-want.com?
The obvious attempt at an answer is to say that it’s a “loss leader” to get people to begin using their services, in the hope that once they do, they’ll then pay for something better.
The free domain only kicks in if they select your site as being worthy.
Bandwidth allowances are not clearly stated - this item in the FAQ does not actually provide the answer it asks for:
My guess: a bit like what Ahu Ha says - a loss leader - except I think there’s a future pressure-sale: they get you in, let you get your site established - if you get hardly any traffic, you’re no burden - if your site is successful and popular, they tell you that you must upgrade to paid hosting - which of course you could go elsewhere for, but most people won’t.
What is unclear about “50GB Bandwidth”?
Where does it say that? Certainly not under the FAQ “What is bandwidth and how much do you provide?” - which would seem a reasonable place to state it.
Oh. OK I see it (yes, big letters)
50GB is quite a bit - equating to multiple thousands of page views per day for websites with the usual mix of text and images… I’m not sure how many people they’re likely to convert to paid hosting with the bar set there
I don’t think that’s what they aim to switch people with. I notice the free account does not support email. While it’s possible to run a business from a Hotmail address, it looks more professional to have your email go to your own domain name.
it seems so fishy! it’s way too good to be true, and I don’t like how they don’t address this basic question about their motivations in the FAQ. It makes me feel rather uneasy.
It could also be that they will at some future point declare ‘sorry guys, we can’t do this for free anymore, you have the choice to join a paid scheme or lose your site’.
A blog site I used once did that, some years ago (although I just looked and they’ve switched back to free blogs again)
Any host that offers a free domain name automatically raises a red flag for me to read their fine print. More often than not, there’s a provision where the host is the owner of the domain name and if in the future you decide to try and get your site hosted elsewhere, you’re SOL in trying to get your domain name transferred.
It’s actually pretty clever (in an evil way) because if at some point you want to move hosts, it’s likely because you’ve outgrown the host’s free plan but you certainly won’t want to give up your domain name so you’re basically forced into staying with them.
I had one like that once - back in the days of dialup - there was a company called freenetname who would give you a free domain name if you signed up to their dialup plan (which was no more expensive than anyone else’s dialup plan).
They charged a £50 release fee on the domain name, if you wanted to take it somewhere else.
Hmm.
If I click on the link for FAQ, I get a box pop up asking for my username and password. If I click cancel, it comes up again.
If I click on the link for Hosting Statistics, I get a 404 page.
I am not impressed with their service so far.
Also, do I understand that unless you qualify for a free domain name, you have to use a subdomain of Zymix? So instead of www.mysite.net I’d have to use www.zymic.com/petermorris/mysite/index.html, or something similar?
Odd, that doesn’t happen for me.
I use 000webhost.com for testing purposes occasionally. I have other for-pay servers I use, but sometimes I don’t want stuff there just yet. This seems to have pretty much everything I would need except shell access (I live in the shell), and something other then FTP for file transfer. If there was scp I could probably live without the shell but I hate FTP, it is insecure for the most part.
You can bring your own domain there I think, I use their free ones because I am just testing stuff.
Other then that, I’d say their selections of features are excellent and exceed what the commenters said about zymic.
I can’t speak to service, uptime, or other performance as I am an infrequent use. But I think this is a small part of their business, they run for pay servers and this is to draw people in and get them to upgrade. But I don’t think they are playing the kinds of games the link above with opinions on zymic seems to describe.
Also, I looked at a lot of these services until a year ago when I found this one. It was the only one I found with no games - there may be others now.
In case anyone knows any free web hosts with no games, and shell access (or at least file transfer via scp) please let me know via PM.