Our company owns a bunch of free hosting services which have approx 500,000 users total. It’s part of my job to keep the networks clean…and it can be very frustrating. So after a long day of booting spammers from the networks I decided to contribute this post to the rest of you who are interested in free hosting. This is assuming that some of you actually consider owning a free host service.
Recently, we have been getting a lot of emails from the abuse department at the best domain registrar out there. These guys are great. They tell us when someone has complained to them about a phishing scam (ID theft), spammers, etc. This helps if we don’t catch them first. The problem and frustration is this: spammers never give up. You delete them and they just resignup and do it all over again. So over the years we’ve had to build tools on our free web space services to ban users by IP address, use a logging tool that tells us anytime a page is uploaded with a flag word, and search for other accounts with the same email address. These tools would help you if you were to find yourself running one of these networks.
If you don’t keep up on these things here is what happens:
1. Your domain will get shut down. In the early days – this used to happen and some registrars put a lock on it and you have to pay to have it activated and show the abuse won’t happen again.
2. Your servers can get shut down. Again, if ebay, hotmail, or yahoo decides to complain to anyone that will listen (which they do – and rarely actually contact us!) – they will complain to the company where your servers are located. If you don’t respond quickly – they shut you down. It’s a liability to the company that controls the bandwidth going to your server. Nobody wants to make one of these big companies with a 20 person legal department uphappy.
3. Your advertisers will leave you…if you don’t provide consistent uptime and quality sites for them to advertise on – they will find another free web hosting company to advertise with. A lot of hosts run google adsense which helps monetize the pages, but they have strict guidelines and will kick you out with no explanation. Most banner networks have disallowed free hosts in the network because of low quality. It’s hard to keep on top of it and it is a full time job.
Some days I like my job, but then you start to see all the filth that is out there and you get discouraged because just when you think you’re on top of it…another guy comes along and starts it all over again. Then you get a nice letter from the domain name registration people – threatening to close down your entire service by disabling the domain name.
So maybe this gives you an idea of what it’s really like to run a free host. It’s not pretty. It’s hard work and takes time.
