Methods of giving out free web hosting

Instant activation

Hosts with instant activation usually give very little storage space and bandwidth allowance, and have lots of limitations. The webhosts usually either require the users' web pages to display their banner ads, textlink ads, or popups; or else the users' files to be uploaded through a web-based file manager that display ads to the user uploading files.

Hosts with instant activation are often abused by spammers, which upload pages to these hosts to use for link spamming

Approved activation

Hosts with approved activation offer good space and Bandwidth but low on features. Approved applications are processed by administrators hired by the free hosting company who validate the applications depending on the details provided by the users. The main objective behind manual approval is to prevent spam and phishing websites.

Activation time can be as low as few minutes or as long as a week. Different hosts have different policies for Approval and Activation.

Post for hosting

Some free hosts require posting in a forum. Forum-based free hosting requires users to either reach a certain amount of posts before getting a free hosting account, or be an active contributor in the forum. Forum-based free hosting often work on a system of points where posts give points to a user and can be used as credits toward getting a hosting account or more resources. Typically, the forum where users have to post contain advertising as the hosts way of making a profit.

A typical example of this system would be to post to gain "credits" (points). Perhaps every credit is equivalent to 24 hours or a day. So, if you make a post and get 7 credits, your hosting account would be active for 7 days. While some hosts allow these credits to be distributed, others do not. However, when they are allowed to be distributed, they might be used as a currency in exchange for services.

Forum applications

This method is popular, as the hosts can decide which applications to deny and allow. This is common when a popular forum has free hosting as an add-on service, rather than the other way around.

File hosting on webhosts

Most free web hosts discourage using their services for file or image hosting only, with no web page, since advertising is displayed on the web page. Because of this, hotlinking is usually disallowed on free hosts. Some free webhosts will also disallow files over a certain size (for example, 5 MB). However, there are free file hosting services which allow large files as well as hotlinking.

Co-branding and resellers

Some services offer co-branding services. These let you brand fixed plans with your own company. Other services, offer WHM or panel reselling. This allows the client to develop his or her own web hosting plans and business.

Free web hosting service

A free web hosting service is a web hosting service that is free, usually advertisement-supported and of limited functionality. Free web hosts will either provide a subdomain (yoursite.example.com) or a directory (www.example.com/~yourname). In contrast, paid web hosts will usually provide a second-level domain along with the hosting (www.yourname.com). Some free hosts do allow use of separately-purchased domains. Rarely, a free host may also operate as a domain name registrar, but their registry services are usually more expensive than others.

A few free web hosts offer basic package for free and enhanced packages (with more features) for a cost. This allows users to try the service for an initial trial (see how it performs compared to other hosts), and then upgrade when (and if) needed.

Free hosting may have the following limitations:

• Limitation on the size of each hosted file
• Very small bandwidth per month compared to paid hosting
• Disabling on hotlinking of files
• File type restrictions (for example MP3, MPEG, ZIP etc.)
• Compulsory placement of the Webhosts' Banner or Popup ads into all web pages
• No provided uptime guarantee
• No allowance of custom URLS such as http://www.domain.com it has to be http://www.provider.com/domain

Some free host may provide these extra features:

• A web based control panel
• Free email accounts for the domain or subdomain hosted (e.g. Netfirms)
• File transfer via FTP
• Scripting languages: PHP, ASP, Perl etc.
• Relational databases such as MySQL
• Scheduled processes, known as cronjobs
• Other features such as guestbooks
• Forums and community resources not typical of paid hosts
• Reward systems which provide extra free products and services

The majority of the the hosting companies use free hosting to introduce their services, and as an entry point to their more expensive offerings. Generally they recoup their costs in one of two ways:

• Advertising - Selling online advertising on the customer sites is generally considered a fair trade - the reasoning is that high traffic sites are more expensive to host, but the additional traffic allows for additional ad impressions therefore covering the cost. For the web master, it can be a good trade if the advertising is of good quality and non-competitive. This is one of the main reasons that businesses do not use free hosting for their website. The majority of free hosting companies use this method.

• Referrals - Using a simple form of viral marketing, these providers rely on the users to spread the offer. The ratio of free to paid accounts is known, and by having each free user refer a number of friends, the hosting provider is able to get enough paid accounts to cover the cost.

• Resell Hosting - This is where someone starts up a hosting company, attracts lots of visitors, then sells the hosting company to someone else once it can no longer support itself. Once sold, this individual uses the money to start up multiple hosting ventures and sells each in turn.

Some hosting companies are using hybrid approaches that mix both tactics.

Premium domain names

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Domain name

The term domain name has multiple related meanings:

• A name that identifies a computer or computers on the Internet. These names appear as a component of a Web site's URL, e.g. en.wikipedia.org. This type of domain name is also called a hostname.
• The product that domain name registrars provide to their customers. These names are often called registered domain names.
• Names used for other purposes in the Domain Name System (DNS), for example the special name which follows the @ sign in an email address, or the Top-level domain names like .com, or the names used by the Session Initiation Protocol (VoIP), or DomainKeys.
• They are sometimes colloquially (and incorrectly) referred to by marketers as "web addresses".

This article will primarily discuss registered domain names. See the Domain Name System article for technical discussions about general domain names and the hostname article for further information about the most common type of domain name.

The most common types of domain names are hostnames that provide more memorable names to stand in for numeric IP addresses. They allow for any service to move to a different location in the topology of the Internet (or an intranet), which would then have a different IP address.

By allowing the use of unique alphabetical addresses instead of numeric ones, domain names allow Internet users to more easily find and communicate with web sites and other server-based services. The flexibility of the domain name system allows multiple IP addresses to be assigned to a single domain name, or multiple domain names to be assigned to a single IP address. This means that one server may have multiple roles (such as hosting multiple independent websites), or that one role can be spread among many servers. One IP address can also be assigned to several servers, as used in anycast and hijacked IP space.

Hostnames are restricted to the ASCII letters a through z (case-insensitive), the digits 0 through 9, and the hyphen, with some other restrictions. Registrars restrict the domains to valid hostnames, because they otherwise would be useless. The Internationalized domain name (IDN) system has been developed to bypass the restrictions on character allowances in hostnames, making it easier for users of non-English alphabets to use the Internet. The underscore character is frequently used to ensure that a domain name is not recognized as a hostname, as with the use of SRV records, for example, although some older systems such as NetBIOS did allow it. Due to confusion and other reasons, domain names with underscores in them are sometimes used where hostnames are required.

Domain names are often referred to simply as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners, although domain names, technically, are leased from a registrar.

Domain

Places

• The Domain, a shopping mall in Austin, Texas, USA
• in several Commonwealth countries, the name for parkland made available for public use by the monarch or their representative, the Governor. Examples include:
  • The Domain, Sydney: a large open space near the central business district of Sydney, Australia
  • Kings Domain, Melbourne: in Victoria, Australia
  • Queens Domain, Hobart: in Tasmania, Australia
  • Auckland Domain: a large inner-city park in Auckland, New Zealand containing an ancient volcano and the War Memorial Museum
  • Throughout New Zealand a Town Domain is typically a public sport area administered by a Domain Board.
• The Domain Tunnel, Melbourne: a tunnel that runs underneath the Yarra River and the Kings Domain in Victoria, Australia

Information technology

In information technology, the term domain can refer to:

• Domain name, Internet domain name (most frequently ending on .com)
• a Windows Server domain, a centrally-managed group of computers using the Windows operating-system
• a broadcast domain in computer networking
• an application domain - the kinds of purposes for which users use a software system
• a software engineering domain - a field of study that defines a set of common requirements, terminology, and functionality for any software program constructed to solve a problem in that field. See also domain-specific programming languages.
• a CLR application domain, a mechanism for separating executed applications (similar to a process)
• In Database Theory, a data domain is a set of all permitted values.
• a workstation operating system called Domain/OS.
• a group of computers on a network that share a common directory or storage locations.