The Business Model of Free Hosting
There is more than one business model for free hosting. Some of the folks on this forum use free trial accounts so that their customers can be comfortable with what they are getting when they buy the full service. "Try before you buy" is pretty straightforward and reasonable as long as that is well-understood in advance.
However, I stumbled across a less-savory business model, in use by a company named 000 web hosting (you can google/bing it without the spaces). They have a free service, and a paid service. The free service has fewer features, but appears quite adequate for most users.
If you sign up for that and start using it, you will finds some undocumented limitations. For instance, you can't have more than 6000 files. If you have ever used Joomla, you can see that this limitation effectively prevents a Joomla installation. It also prevents a site from actually growing very big.
Another undocumented "feature" is that your site will be taken down "for TOS review" every few weeks, making it unavailable for one to two hours, at more-or-less random times.
The kicker is this: Things will go ok for a while, and the support will even be adequate. However, after you have used their service for six months (just long enough to build out a non-trivial website), you will find that your site has been taken down "for TOS violation." You will be unable to get any information about this, or for that matter, any kind of support whatever, unless and until you upgrade to a paid account. If you don't have a current backup, you are screwed -- unless you pay money.
Therein lies the business model.
A free webhost is possibly useful for doing some testing, but if you already have a hosting service that allows you to host several domains, you can just use what you already have.
