Hmm, yeah. He might have some insider info for us to shed more light on the situation. Unfortunately I haven’t seen him on any hosting forums for many months.
This is inevitable and obviously gonna happen when you see someone/an individual (in this case @Liam) offer sketchy “lifetime” deals and then sell up, it’s only a matter of time until the new owners (a proper company) try and wiggle out of the “lifetime” customers.
Shock Hosting is the premium brand and they’re hoping they can get even 10% of customers to pay the premium, if so it’s a success, while at the same time likely avoiding/wiggling out of “lifetime” deals.
Now that explains why their client areas are Identical!! Damn I just got duped away from a lifetime plan. lol now I am paying the same company 10 quid per quarter, as long as they don’t vanish and offer me more expensive hosting somewhere else. haha
Free hosting is great and all, but one thing I realized that is money is a terrific motivator for hosts to offer decent quality service. If you aren’t being paid, would you put in your all to make sure sh*t stays online? Most won’t.
Most budget hosts makes nothing or close to nothing with those super duper ultra budget plans.
When customer spends money, they should get proper and fast support. Which is impossible with budget hosting “profit”.
Self satisfaction. I always looked at my free hosting project as charity. Feels good to offer something good for no cost to other. :). Plus, tax write off
Even with budget hosts*, there is a contractual obligation to provide service as long as the terms and conditions are satisfied. I’d rather have something (even if it isn’t much) compelling the host to provide service rather than nothing. Free hosting just doesn’t have this, and for me this is something I value in a service.
I’m quite aware that budget hosts often make little to no (and sometimes lose!) money. I don’t entirely agree with point 2 – customers should receive support proportional to the pricing and plan they’ve obtained. For instance, you should not expect 5 minute responses for a $1/month VPS. That’s ridiculous. But if I’m paying $50/month for a 2GB VPS with management, I would expect great support.
And I can’t argue with 3. – what you want to do is ultimately up to you, and if that means offering free hosting, then good for you
Note: excluding any CC/LEB hosts and scams like AlphaShit; common sense goes a long way
I keep saying… Lifetime deals are not worth it.
They were featured on Mashable with a $25 Lifetime deal that included a 1y domain.
1 year and 11 months later they are closing down.
When users pay monthly for your service, if they ever stop paying/using it you can just free up the disk space, and that “user slot” to reduce the WHMCS and cPanel price. When you are running Lifetime deals you simply cant without starting a new company and closing the previous one.
Lifetime deals are of course sort of a gamble. I wouldn’t buy any where I don’t believe it’s likely the provider will be still going strong in at least 2-3 years, and of course we don’t have any guarantees …