Bit of background:
I have been offered to buy a free hosting site, which I see as reasonably priced. The site was established in mid march, an receives good traffic- 5,978 pageviews, 869 visits in the period of 28 Mar 2012 - 5 Apr 2012 (what i have stats for). The site currently has 730+ users. Expenses apparently are $50 a month
My questions relate to monetizing the site:
Is it actually possible to make money from free hosting?
What is the best way to do this? Ads, upgrades, domains sales etc?
If the cost is so low, should think of how much work you actually have to put in it, its been a while since i’ve acutally used a free hosting but from what i remember they would put an ad at the foot of the page either google ads or just an automatic link back to the site, and of course have ads on the main site. Might want to offer paid hosting upgrade or as you mention domain sells and maybe even a low priced ad removal.
Is I already mentioned I would think about how much work it involves and if you actually have the time needed or willing to invest more money and time to it to make it work in the long run.
Free hosting is used by many who only need a website up as a hobby or they want to publish it for testing before they go live with a paid host. Most free web hosting sites make money with ads. Recently, Google made some changes about how page rank will be affected by posting above and below the fold ads. Your best best would be to look at examples of other free hosts and what they are doing to monetize their sites. Most free hosting users will eventually move to paid hosting where they have more control over their website and an absence of advertising.
You need to precaution on this while buy over a free hosting is risk , because the hosting provider may have term and regulation for the free hosting and it may charges you for the transfer owner. Or maybe you may get cheat and get the site close after a few days.
So it better you only paid full amount to pay for the site and migrate to the paid hosting to secure purpose.
RUN RUN the other way. You will but so much time and money into it … It looks like you want a business and this is not the kind you want if you are not ready to drop loads of money to grow and maintain it. Be very wary of traffic reports even the best wont tell you if the guy is buying traffic from addme or something.