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May 03, 2006
Free web hosting will be stopped
As you may be aware that Josue and I run a web hosting company "SonneX Hosting". Josue started this company with some of his friends back in 2003 to provide free web hosting to friends and other people who couldn't afford to pay for web hosting.
The idea was simple, in order to earn your free web hosting account, visitors had to register at our forums and make 50 good posts. After this they could request their hosting account. In order to maintain the hosting account, they had to make 50 posts in the sonnex hosting forums every year. Well not a bad deal if you ask me.
However as popularity of the website increased we had to move from a reseller account to a dedicated server. This naturally meant increase in the running cost. Where was the money coming from? Honestly there was no revenue source so most of the money was coming from our pockets.
Soon many people wanted more features, reliability and better support and they were ready to pay for it. As the demand for support and uptime increased, we launched few paid plans along with our free hosting plans. Things were working great for few months until a spammer hosted in one of our free accounts got our server down. Many paid/free hosting members left.
The year ahead was equally challenging. Web hosting prices dropped and dropped to rock bottom. Any and every kid in the next door who had a reseller account or a VPS started his hosting company. Many of those fly by night hosting shops ran away with people's money and data.
Since hosting had become to cheap, many who couldn't afford it earlier, opted for paid plans in the hope of better support and uptime. This meant, we had to concentrate more on our paid plans, clients and in promoting our company. Since resource were bare minimum we decided to close the free web hosting section of our company.
This move will allow us to concentrate on our core market and improve our service better. The resources which were being directed to maintaining free hosting accounts will be now diverted to our paid section.
Posted by manish at May 3, 2006 09:10 AM