As suggested by its name, free hosting means you get a hosting account for your domain or a hosting account with a free domain name (usually a sub-domain name) without paying the provider. Most free hosting providers give you some disk space for you to upload your files. Once your files, usually html files, are uploaded, you will make a presence in WWW world: other people are able to visit your “homepage”.

In addition to this traditional free hosting, which gives you disk space for you to upload and store your files either through ftp or web interface, there is another type of free hosting that gives you a forum (free forum hosting), a blog (free blog hosting), or a portal, e.g., phpnuke, mambo (free portal hosting). For this type of free hosting, you usually get a pre-installed forum/bbs, blog or portal. In most cases, you are not able to modify these files because all users share the same files. Then, where are my data? The trick is most of your data are stored in a database (usually a MySQL database); each user will have a few tables for his forum, blog or portal. This is sometimes referred as multi-forum hosting, multi-blog hosting or multi-portal hosting. Thanks to the “open source” and GNU or similar licenses, a lot of database-driven scripts (bbs, blog, content manage management system, guestbook….), with some modification, can be used for multi-users without installing the scripts again and again for each user.

If it is really free, who will pay the bill? When we say free hosting, it simply means “you”, as a user, do not pay. The cost and probably some profits are usually gained through advertisements that are very likely already put on your site. Some providers may also generate revenues from account upgrading (when you need more than they provided in free hosting, you have to pay to upgrade.) and other related services (e.g., domain registration).

There is no free lunch. This is always true. For free hosting, the truth is that your site would generate revenue for your free hosting provider. You can call it win-win.