FREE webhosting as long as supplies lasts

There is no such thing as free web hosting. That is just a bold headline to catch your attention.

People are looking for free hosting

Looking at search queries leading to our website i find "free php hosting" to be the top five most frequently referrer. Also, Google AdWords constantly suggests to bid on keywords like "free hosting". And, we see that people are especially attracted by the free fact. But hey, we don't do shady business here! Our platform is a really sophisticated high quality hosting service.

Free web hosting origins

Time warp to the 90s. Until then only big companies could afford to present themselves in the internet. Some universities offered webspace for their students. And the first Hosting services for end consumers came up: Services like GeoCities, TriPod and AngelFire offered free hosting while displaying ad banners. My theory is that this somehow became Facebook and Tumblr later on, but that's a different story. A bit later classical hosting was established. It offered inexpensive shared hosting plans. Fake-free: Providers often used "zero price" tags to convey customers that their plans are for free.

Freemium

Nowadays users are aware of subscription traps. Crippleware to the rescue. Freemium is a low-touch marketing trick: A service provider gives away a core part of the product for free while trying to push the user into a paid plan. For Software as a Service the freemium level is mostly fictional: the operating costs are nearly zero. The service is worth … well … what it is worth to you. It save you time, it saves you money, it let's you be more productive, you can do things in a different way, or you can even do things that you haven't been able to do before. Great. Awesome. Basically SaaS providers just have to make sure that the conversation rate from freemium to premium is high enough. For our Platform as a Service the same benefit values apply. But we also rent out computing resources and those always cost some real money. That's why it is so hard to offer a real good freemium product here. We want to be as open as possible, let people experience the benefits of our service, but the paid plans should not pay (too much) for these free tiers. We calculated very carefully how much we can spend on this. The result is that Apps running on a free plan are freezing after 48 hours of inactivity. Now, we see that people are annoyed by that: https://twitter.com/silentworks/status/256079491187740672 And we can understand it. Our aim is to provide a painless PHP cloud development environment for free. In an ideal world we would like our clients to convert to a paid plan just because they love the service sooooooo much, just like we all purchased a Sublime Text licence, because it is such a nice editor. We see our PaaS colleagues struggle with this as well. Appfog recently limited their free (forever) offering. DotCloud has even canceled their freemium plan completely. Quality PHP hosting can't be free. We are evaluating very carefully if and how we can make our free entry level better. https://twitter.com/niall_obrien/status/320157347085434881