Is ad-financed web hosting still profitable and tolerable today?

AGXL · September 15

I remember that in the 2000s there were some companies that offered free web hosting in exchange for advertising banners on the user website or in the web control panel. This system seemed to work well at the time. There were also some companies that mailed out newsletters with affiliate offers.

A little nostalgic side story: I had my first website with such a provider when I was seven years old, in 2001. I was very happy with it.

Since I've been doing web hosting for over 15 years, I've been thinking about whether it needs a revival. For example, I thought about the customer logging into the web control panel, just like on various news portals, and having a choice of four videos that they have to click on to continue. It's like watching an advert before a YouTube video.

I've noticed recently that there are fewer and fewer of these adverts.

I would appreciate a lively discussion and answers to the questions.

MannDude · September 15

I'm just going to say that it's probably not much tolerable today.

People aren't coding simple static HTML pages like they did in the early 2000's. Aside from the UI gaudiness of a forced banner within a site's header or footer (for example), they're going to be blocked more and more by users who use ad-blockers or use browsers who may have security settings that prevent them from loading, depending on how they're implemented in a user's design by force.

lukast__ · September 15

I doubt the market for that exists anymore/is of a size where it would be profitable, as today it's pretty easy to host websites free and ad-free, and in addition I think that if you want to inject some ads on arbitrary websites, the cost/time of developing something that wouldn't work everywhere anyway would far outweigh any potential income through those ads, except maybe if you host really many websites.
If you display ads in a management panel, you have the problem that the user usually doesn't visit that panel multiple times a day, so that likely won't be profitable as well (unless, of course, you do it on a really large scale).
Generally, ad-blockers are becoming far more common, reducing potential income even more.
And finally, are websites hosted somewhere for free even getting enough visits to earn enough money through ads to finance the servers/support/etc?
Edit: and about tolerable, I wouldn't touch such a webhosting package.

ruedislik · September 16

@lukast__ said:
I doubt the market for that exists anymore/is of a size where it would be profitable, as today it's pretty easy to host websites free and ad-free, and in addition I think that if you want to inject some ads on arbitrary websites, the cost/time of developing something that wouldn't work everywhere anyway would far outweigh any potential income through those ads, except maybe if you host really many websites.
If you display ads in a management panel, you have the problem that the user usually doesn't visit that panel multiple times a day, so that likely won't be profitable as well (unless, of course, you do it on a really large tunnel rush scale).
Generally, ad-blockers are becoming far more common, reducing potential income even more.
And finally, are websites hosted somewhere for free even getting enough visits to earn enough money through ads to finance the servers/support/etc?
Edit: and about tolerable, I wouldn't touch such a webhosting package.

Hosting a large number of sites to offset that could work, but like you said, it's still a long shot. Are there successful examples of web hosting companies using different revenue models?

DrNutella · September 16

We can deploy websites for free everywhere. Cloudfare is free. Amongst others.

You can host it at home with DDNS safely too. Open source routing is new but reliable.

legendary · September 16

I run free hosting gig in my country for 4 years. Observations from practice:

Only around 0.2% converts to paid package;
By default free service provider is deemed non-trustable;
Mostly used for testing;
Malicious users are 35%;
As advertisement source for paid service free services are not bad, but there is methods with less hasle;
To be viable business everything you ise on infra must be home made or free: billing panel, control panel. If you use blesta and directadmin - you are screwed. You need completely free options to minize running costs;
Think about exit. How many clients to gather before sell out etc.
Keep documentation up to date. This is crucial;
Be patient. This is minimum 10 years to ripe for sell out;
Buy servers at bf event only. Never full price, but don’t skim uptime.

Ympker · September 17

@legendary said:
I run free hosting gig in my country for 4 years. Observations from practice:

Only around 0.2% converts to paid package;

By default free service provider is deemed non-trustable;

Mostly used for testing;

Malicious users are 35%;

As advertisement source for paid service free services are not bad, but there is methods with less hasle;

To be viable business everything you ise on infra must be home made or free: billing panel, control panel. If you use blesta and directadmin - you are screwed. You need completely free options to minize running costs;

Think about exit. How many clients to gather before sell out etc.

Keep documentation up to date. This is crucial;

Be patient. This is minimum 10 years to ripe for sell out;

Buy servers at bf event only. Never full price, but don’t skim uptime.

Back in the days, I also wanted to offer free web hosting. Quickly noticed rapid increase of abuse, and shut the offer down again rather quickly. After that, I offered free hosting to trusted forum members of a forum where I spent a lot of years before I came to the green forum. This worked very well, no abuse at all, but in the end people just let things idle, or moved on to some paid host for more resources. At some point, I also decided to shut that down as it didn't really feel rewarding either. Wasn't looking for a financial reward (I didn't offer any upselling from free tier), but if you're hosting sort of a graveyard, it doesn't feel exciting either (except you're into that kind of stuff, of course). This marked the end of my free hosting journey. I think what may have been more rewarding would be to offer free hosting only to registered No-Profits, but then again I didn't want to put up such a hurdle for people to join either.
Recently I thought about donating some gameservers hosted on my zap lifetime vps with their gamepanel to some clans/communities, but then I read about malware being spread on CS and Minecraft servers, and I ended up not doing so.
In the end, free hosting is a tough game these days, I believe. And it's often more time consuming than worth it. It was simpler back in the days for sure.

yoursunny · September 17

Banner on my website?

This can never work, because I can code around it.
Example:

<!-- </head><body> -->

Banner on control panel?

I'll never see it except first time.
I only upload via rsync.
Any server that lacks rsync is disqualified.

Is ad-financed web hosting still profitable and tolerable today?

Comments

Banner on my website?

Banner on control panel?