sluggishness, and ads / watermarks added to my site. These are 2 of the things that I remember to have bothered me the most when I tried free hosters some 20 years ago (I was a newbie back then and didn't know how bad free hosting is for SEO, so I used it for a couple of years before I finally moved to paid hosting, as the free hosters were putting ads on, or watermarking my pages)
probably keep prices affordable for newbies / most people. If you manage to have 5-10 plans, starting at only $1 per month and you manage to break into markets of highly populated countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, etc) I think you have a good chance to acquire a lot of clients if you manage to beat the local competition which - unfortunately - over the last few years I've seen that it's become big. But I still think you have a better chance there than in USA / European markets...
You could offer plans like
free
$1 / month
$2 / month
$3 / month
$4 / month
$5 / month
$10 / month
$15 / month
$20 / month
etc...
This way you'll catch people of all financial levels, and - if your service is of decent quality and doesn't try to rip people off like many companies do nowadays - you could create a loyal customerbase in a few years, and from there onwards it's just a matter of keeping things simple and affordable for your existing customers while marketing the hell out of your business to attract even more customers...
Needless to say that the upgrading to / downgrading from each plan should be done as smoothly as possible (preferably free of charge, instantly, and without any loss of data) so that people can move between plans as they need it....
I'd personally be OK with 1-2 GB storage, free SSL, and like anywhere from 1 GB to 10 GB of bandwidth....
Also, 100k inodes would be decent too I think, for me the inodes (files) part is one of the biggest issues with modern hosters because these fuckers never mention the number of files we can have with each plan (you always have to contact them to ask about this limit, or to dig deep through their knowledgebase to find the answer... if the answer is even there as most of the time they hide it) and quite often I encounter the "you've reached your inodes limit" type of errors because the lower plans always come with 100-250k inodes limits, which - for some reasons - it never seemed to be enough for my websites.
But 100k inodes for the free plan I think would be fair, and this number should obviously increase with each plan to the point where your highest paying plan should offer something like 5-50 million inodes (if financially possible, of course, otherwise you can lower it)
And as I mentioned earlier: speed! Speed is one of the most important ranking factors nowadays, and if the free plan doesn't offer high speeds I think people will be reluctant to trusting that the paid plans offer better speed. I know that this sound like a stupid assumption, but it was the assumption that I've made when I used free hosting, I tried a few free hosters (awardspace and 000freewebhosting are the 2 that I remember off the top of my head, but there's been more than 2 I promise) and all of them were sluggish as fuck, both at backend and frontend level, so I eventually ditched these websites even if the speed of their paid plans may have been great, I wouldn't know since I was so put off by the limits of the free plans that I never bothered to give the paid plans a try)
Thank you for your reply.
sluggishness, and ads / watermarks added to my site. These are 2 of the things that I remember to have bothered me the most when I tried free hosters some 20 years ago (I was a newbie back then and didn't know how bad free hosting is for SEO, so I used it for a couple of years before I finally moved to paid hosting, as the free hosters were putting ads on, or watermarking my pages)
I don’t plan to generate any income from this project other than donations (so I don’t have a revenue model beyond covering the current server costs). I will implement the necessary optimizations to ensure the websites are not slow.
probably keep prices affordable for newbies / most people. If you manage to have 5-10 plans, starting at only $1 per month and you manage to break into markets of highly populated countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, etc) I think you have a good chance to acquire a lot of clients if you manage to beat the local competition which - unfortunately - over the last few years I've seen that it's become big. But I still think you have a better chance there than in USA / European markets...
You could offer plans like
free
$1 / month
$2 / month
$3 / month
$4 / month
$5 / month
$10 / month
$15 / month
$20 / month
etc...
This way you'll catch people of all financial levels, and - if your service is of decent quality and doesn't try to rip people off like many companies do nowadays - you could create a loyal customerbase in a few years, and from there onwards it's just a matter of keeping things simple and affordable for your existing customers while marketing the hell out of your business to attract even more customers...
Needless to say that the upgrading to / downgrading from each plan should be done as smoothly as possible (preferably free of charge, instantly, and without any loss of data) so that people can move between plans as they need it....
I would like to sell hosting. Since I’m not new to this field, I believe I could offer some of the best and most affordable hosting services. However, I live in Turkey, and to legally sell hosting here I would at least need to set up a sole proprietorship (which costs around $80 to establish), pay for accounting services (about $50 per month), plus cover server costs (around $200 per month) and IP transit costs (around $100–200 per month). Altogether, it becomes quite expensive.
For a university student like me, these costs are very high.
Note: This might not seem expensive to you, but for a young person in Turkey, it really is.
I'd personally be OK with 1-2 GB storage, free SSL, and like anywhere from 1 GB to 10 GB of bandwidth....
Also, 100k inodes would be decent too I think, for me the inodes (files) part is one of the biggest issues with modern hosters because these fuckers never mention the number of files we can have with each plan (you always have to contact them to ask about this limit, or to dig deep through their knowledgebase to find the answer... if the answer is even there as most of the time they hide it) and quite often I encounter the "you've reached your inodes limit" type of errors because the lower plans always come with 100-250k inodes limits, which - for some reasons - it never seemed to be enough for my websites.
But 100k inodes for the free plan I think would be fair, and this number should obviously increase with each plan to the point where your highest paying plan should offer something like 5-50 million inodes (if financially possible, of course, otherwise you can lower it)
And as I mentioned earlier: speed! Speed is one of the most important ranking factors nowadays, and if the free plan doesn't offer high speeds I think people will be reluctant to trusting that the paid plans offer better speed. I know that this sound like a stupid assumption, but it was the assumption that I've made when I used free hosting, I tried a few free hosters (awardspace and 000freewebhosting are the 2 that I remember off the top of my head, but there's been more than 2 I promise) and all of them were sluggish as fuck, both at backend and frontend level, so I eventually ditched these websites even if the speed of their paid plans may have been great, I wouldn't know since I was so put off by the limits of the free plans that I never bothered to give the paid plans a try)
I’m planning to offer users 5 GB of storage (for now, with the possibility of increasing it in the future). Bandwidth will be “unlimited” in practice—I say that because I’m thinking of allowing around 10–20 TB of traffic per month per user, which realistically no one should exceed, so it makes sense to present it as unlimited.
The same idea applies to inodes. While technically there will be a limit, I don’t expect any user on a free service to exceed around 500k files, so it will effectively be “unlimited” as well.
In addition, I plan to offer unlimited database storage (since I don’t have a strict cap in mind), along with:
- 3 domains
- 5 databases
- 5 subdomains
- 1 FTP account
- Free SSL
These resources will also be customizable depending on the user. My main goal is to allow developers and students to test their projects comfortably without having to pay.
I’m fully aware that some users may try to abuse the system, or even create multiple accounts to take advantage of the storage. Honestly, I don’t mind this too much—as long as they don’t negatively impact server performance, I don’t see it as a major issue.
That said, I also understand there will be abuse. It’s almost inevitable, especially with free services. However, unlike many providers, I won’t act on vague or unverified abuse reports. I will only respond to legitimate, well-documented cases. At the same time, I will maintain a zero-tolerance policy for clearly proven abuse.
