Lesson #04 Hosting Your Free Site
Written By Titmowse

As stated in previous lessons, a free site is one where the surfer can view the whole of your web without having to pay money.

Since you do not make money from membership payments, your income and expenses are dependent on the sales you generate through your sponsor banners and affiliate links. Applying creative methods of making money and making sure they work is essential.

If you pay for a domain name and hosting, you will be responsible for all the bandwidth fees of your site. You will also have a lot more control over what your site will look like and what it will have to offer.

If you put your site on a free host, you have to take into account that you will lose customers to the header/footer advertisements embedded on every page. Free hosts like to take up the prime real estate on your website to promote their own interests in exchange for letting you host your site with them.

Most link directories will not care for the free host you have chosen and will blacklist any submissions from them. A paid host will get you betters listings, but if you get 80,000 hits from that listing, you had better make sure you sell your sponsors well. If you don't make enough money from sign-ups to cover the cost of your bandwidth and hosting fees, you will be in a deep hole.

This is the catch 22 of the free site. Even more so than a paysite, your sales acumen is your most vital skill when it comes to running a free one.

You have to give your visitors just enough content to tease them into a horny lather and make them so excited, they will gladly sign up with your sponsors. You have to give them something they will want to add to their bookmarks. You have to offer them a place to download stuff that nobody else has.

Cozy Academy recommends that if you are new to the adult Internet and you wish to build a free site, you put it on a free host. That way, you have the time to figure out how the market works without bandwidth costs. If you do decide to get a paid hosting account, startup up with a small account and work your way up as you build experience.

Another possibility we advise is to find a sponsor that offers free, bannerless hosting in trade for your promotion of their products. What this means is the sponsor will give you domain space without any annoying header banners. Their requirement for this is that you promote ONLY their products or paysites. If they catch you trying to sell the programs of another company, your account will be closed and your page will die.

To learn more about where you should host your free site, please visit the our Cozy Academy Library page for a detailed listing of different types of adult web hosts. We also recommend the Hosting Helper guide on Cozy Frog!