Author Topic: Free Web Hosting Discontinued (Read 724 times)

Alex Melen · « **on:** September 26, 2011, 12:34:48 PM »

Due to continued abuse, we have chosen to discontinue our free web hosting services. FTP will remain active for several months for members to retrieve their files. All members are encouraged to upgrade to our paid hosting services and utilize the exclusive promotions below to upgrade.

Coupon code: 1CENT - Premium personal paid hosting for just 1 cent for the first month (a $4.98 value).
Coupon code: 20%OFF - 20% recurring discount on all of our paid hosting plans (personal and business).

Links: Compare Paid Hosting Plans | Sign up for premium personal paid hosting

wetwetwet · « **Reply #1 on:** September 26, 2011, 12:53:24 PM »

Noooooooooooo!

Please don't do that: it's letting them win.

Free hosts will always suffer a bit of abuse, that's why you have an abuse-report procedure to get abusive sites taken down.

Don't let the rest of us suffer because of a few undesirables out there.

Alex Melen · « **Reply #2 on:** September 26, 2011, 12:58:13 PM »

Unfortunately, the amount of abuse has gotten completely out of hand. The legal costs involved in keeping the free hosting division up is amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The best we can do is offer a discount to allow members to upgrade to the premium paid hosting service. We will also be rolling out another hosting service (which will slot between free hosting and paid premium hosting) sometime next month.

lekce · « **Reply #3 on:** September 26, 2011, 04:28:18 PM »

hi everybody, thank you for letting us know and I can understand the reasons for your decision. But one thing I would like to know: is your paid program better and more reliable than the free hosting was? So many off-times, time out errors - and I couldn't connect to FTP very often, whenever I contacted support I was told that it was a problem with MY connection even all other sites were working perfectly (after all I could read about similar problems from others users in your forum). When I then add some reviews on other sites about the reliability of T35 hosting, I really doubt if it is worth to start a paid hosting with you. To be honest I took the free hosting time as a test time to see if your site is interesting for me, up to now it hasn't convinced me too much...

Sure, we all want to make money and we all try to sell ourselves as the best and therefore the usually phrases "99.9% uptime" in advertisements are not very informative - but how is it with paid accounts on T35? Could I be sure that my site is working and I could connect without problems whenever I feel like to, or will I have the same troubles again as I had with my free account?

Thank you for your reply and all the best with your new projects!

Alex Melen · « **Reply #4 on:** September 26, 2011, 06:40:52 PM »

Paid hosting is a completely different product. It's a premium product and offers a lot more reliability and features than free hosting. You can use the 1 cent coupon to try out the premium paid hosting service for just 1 cent.

wetwetwet · « **Reply #5 on:** September 27, 2011, 06:26:46 AM »

All free-hosting members are going to immediately lose all Google pagerank even if they continue their site at a new address because we had no advance notification of this termination and therefore no time to implement a redirect, and the Google Webmaster Tools doesn't allow you to "change site address" for subdomain-hosted sites.

Given that you're leaving your server running and allowing ftp access for a little while, could you perhaps see your way to allowing us to upload an .htaccess to implement redirects to inform Google of our new address. Anyone who doesn't implement a redirect could then get the default redirect to your "T35 has shut down" page.

Quote from: Alex Melen on September 26, 2011, 12:58:13 PM

We will also be rolling out another hosting service (which will slot between free hosting and paid premium hosting) sometime next month.

Will it be a general website hosting service?
(i.e. upload your own html/css/js/jpeg, not just a template/blog host)

Will it be free? Yes or no.

Alex Melen · « **Reply #6 on:** September 27, 2011, 08:39:04 AM »

Unfortunately, because of legal reasons we can't discuss here, we can't allow the sites to remain up or be redirected anywhere. That would allow all the spammers and fake sites to keep redirecting the url's - which is what caused problems in the first place.

The new service will not be free, but will be cheaper than premium paid hosting. We're still working on the details.

kasili73 · « **Reply #7 on:** September 27, 2011, 10:38:45 PM »

If I will a get a paid hosting account, will the free hosting account be re-directed to the paid hosted site?

Thanks

Alex Melen · « **Reply #8 on:** September 28, 2011, 03:02:11 PM »

Unfortunately, we can't allow old free hosting url's to be redirected since it will allow the abusers to keep opporating their spam and phishing operations.

Alex Melen · « **Reply #9 on:** October 10, 2011, 12:54:04 PM »

Just an update that we're working with another company who might be taking over the free web hosting services and would offer the same services to the current T35 Hosting 2,000,000+ free hosting client base. They would also transfer all the current sites/content to their system. I'll keep everyone posted - we should have more information by the end of the week.

aliyakhan · « **Reply #10 on:** October 24, 2011, 04:39:10 PM »

Hello alax!
why you have closed your free web hosting?
I was going to start in that.
so can you please start it again?

Alex Melen · « **Reply #11 on:** October 25, 2011, 12:54:55 PM »

Sorry, due to legal reasons beyond our control, we can no longer offer free web hosting.

serena85 · « **Reply #12 on:** November 03, 2011, 07:51:03 AM »

A big decision you had to take but I have the feeling it was for the better, however if you want to keep the good part of your free users implement the new payed system faster.

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Free Web Hosting Discontinued