May 16, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - Free web hosting was until recently for blogs, students, hobby coder test sites and pics of the new baby but the intense competition in the web hosting market has brought free web hosting with more advanced features and higher end tools to SMBs without forcing a domain name or advertising on free hosting consumers. Even Yahoo! is offering free hosting for SMBs and Google is offering free hosting for bloggers. A number of other web hosts are offering free hosting to groups such as students or for open source projects.
One of the latest companies to offer free hosting with features and services traditionally reserved for paid hosting is Websiteallies.com.
“We’ve taken free hosting to a new level by even offering our clients total customer support. This is something traditional free hosting companies just don’t do” says Websiteallies.com founder, Courtney Bernard.
“Free hosting customers are no longer satisfied with simplistic features such as basic guestbooks, hit counters, file managers and surveys,” explains Doug Lewis of Vantage Internet, who helped launch the new features and design of the Websiteallies.com site. “Users now want the same full feature scripts that the paid hosting customer expects, such as Blogs, Web Site portals, shopping carts, professional photo galleries, customer support ticketing systems and much more.”
“We find that most users don’t want to be limited to using the scripts offered by the regular free hosting companies. Users want full ftp access and the ability to use not only the pre-installed scripts, but also upload their own scripts to their hosting account.” says Lewis.
Websiteallies.com allows customers to use their own domain name, as well as offering customer support. The customer support includes a 24 hour live chat, a customer support ticketing system and web forum monitoring.
The question is now how these free hosting providers will make money and whether they will be able to come up with a bottom line profit and how more traditionally priced hosting providers will react.
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