New Jersey – June 9, 2011 – HostSEO.org gives webmasters the ability to assign unique class C-IP’s to each domain. Each Class C-IP address costs $5, which great considering you receive 20GB of space and 2000 GB of bandwidth as well as an instant backup service.  There is no limit to the amount of unique class C-IP’s one could buy and the amount of domains one could have on each class C-IP. However, in order to get the full value of SEO hosting each domain should have its own IP. Another benefit to using the SEO web hosting service is that you could manage all your domains under one WHM account.  In addition, just like Backlink Build, HostSEO.org has a live chat feature to help users who are new to SEO and SEO web hosting.

Hosting on Unique IP’s determines how well a webmaster can increase his search engine rankings. It’s no secret that all major search engines, including Google, partially determine your website ranking based on the sites that link to you; and webmasters typically have multiple sites linked together to improve their backlink hits. The more times web users hit the backlinks the more the higher the website ranking; however, the ingenuity  of search engines allowed them to determine if your sites are all hosted under the same server. Therefore, search engines will not rank increase your website ranking if they find out all of your sites under the same server. Nevertheless, HostSEO.org allows you to host all of your websites from one server but on unique class C-IP’s. Search engines cannot determine whether your sites are on the same server, thereby allowing you to pass link juice when linking your sites.

Additional Services offered by all HostSEO.org Plans:

• cPanel and WHM Control Panel
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Backlink Build, a web development and SEO expert company, was founded in 2009 and has since developed relationships with over 400 clients engaging in numerous niches. The company’s website offers unique and highly integrated SEO packages with a combination of backlinks, blogging, social bookmarking, and directory submissions. T35 Hosting was founded in 1997 as a free web hosting company. Currently, it boasts a total of 1.8 million customers and it continues to grow every day. It also offers paid web hosting services with unlimited domain hosting.

Well, even the might Yahoo! no longer wants anything to do with free web hosting. For those that were online in the 1990′s, you might recall that Yahoo! spent over $2.87 billion to buy geocities. That’s right folks, say that number outloud to yourselves. $2.87 BILLION dollars. Not to mention that $2.87B in 1999 dollars would equal well over $3 BILLION today. Ironically enough, the value of the entire Yahoo! corporation was down to as low as $12B earlier this year.

Geocities was one of the original web hosts, and was actually one of the few that was started before T35. I actually enjoyed competing with them over the years (as opposed to competing with Google and all the dirty tricks they use). Here’s the official and final word from the Geocities folks themselves:

Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available. After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We’ll share more details this summer.

Dear User,
As announced on the 26th of November 2008 the portal and webhosting activities of the Lycos Europe GmbH will be discontinued. Unfortunately, the free hosting service Tripod is effected. For this reason we are hereby terminating your Tripod Account as of 15th February 2009. Until the 15th February you can use your Tripod account and your Homepage as usual. After this date we will close your account and delete all your content which was stored on Tripod in accordance with legal requirements. After this date it will be ímpossible to view your Homepage in the internet or to do a Backup using FTP from your page because the content will be unrecoverably deleted. That is why we advise you to to backup all necessary data in the near future from your Tripod Account on your hard drive and if wanted to upload it to another homepage provider. Please keep in mind that we do not offer any support for the free homepages neither by phone nor by email for upcoming questions. Because of this reason we created a short description how to backup your data. We regret having to take this step and we want to thank you for your confidence in the past. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed in doing so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service. Despite the sad news we wish you and your family a successful 2009.
Best wishes,
Your Lycos Tripod Team

For those who read my “What happened to free web hosting?” post from last year, Tripod was one of the few that was actually still around and operating. I guess I spoke too soon though. Although I haven’t used my tripod account in half a decade, it’s still sad to see another iconic 90′s free web host close it’s doors.

*UPDATE* I am still trying confirm if this applies to all of tripod, or only the European operations (tripod.co.uk). If anyone knows, please feel free to chime in.

1. WE OFFER TERABYTES OF SPACE.. ALL FOR $1.. WE PROMISE!

You’ve seen all the offers.. tens of thousands of gigabytes.. thousands of terabytes.. all for just a few dollars. Think it’s too good to be true? Well, it is. How do you think the hosts afford all that space? It’s a simple trick that is known as “overselling” in the web hosting world. Hosts sell 100x-1000x more space then they actually have hoping you don’t use it. And what happens if you start using it? Well if you read their terms of service, most of these hosts control your account based on cpu usage. At the same time, “file storage” isn’t allowed. So as soon as you upload more than 1gb, or get more then a few thousand visitors on your site, you will find your site gone. Of course none of the hosts want you to know this, so they hide it in confusing fine print and terms of service aggreements. I hate to say it, but mom & pop might have been right… if it’s too good to be true, it probably is a scam.

2. WE HAVE BEEN IN BUSINESS FOR DECADES.

I find it funny how several well known hosts claim to have been around for “decades”. Another one boldly states “In Business since 1988″. I hate to break it to you guys, but there wasn’t really such a thing as web hosting back then. I’ve been involved in the hosting industry almost since the beginning, and I know for a fact there weren’t any $5/mo hosts around in the 1980′s. Before believing a hosts claim, check the whois on the domain and see when they registered it. The funny part is that most hosts that claim to be more than 10 years old haven’t been around more than a 1 year! Obviously they don’t want you to know this, so do your due diligence and make sure you don’t get scammed by a fly-by-night host.

3.  WE HAVE OUR OWN DATACENTER – THOUSANDS OF SQ FEET

Face it, no matter what web host you go to, their site has pictures of huge datacenters, thousands of servers! Unfortunatly, most web hosts are just “re-sellers”. Just people with some spare time that rent some space on someones server for $20/mo and try to re-sell the space to a 100+ people. Best way to check? Ask for the address and other information on their datacenter. The trick here is that many hosts will give you the information of their providers datacenter (who they are renting from!), but if you are persistent enough and dig around you should be able to dig up the truth.

4. OUR HOSTING IS ONLY $5/MO – BUT YOU HAVE TO SIGN UP UNTIL 2050.

I don’t know what it is these days, but web hosting used to follow the logic of “what you see is what you get”. Now you have everyone advertising plans for $5/mo, but when you get to their website you find out it’s $20/month! What’s the deal?? Well it turns out that you need to sign up for 2 years, 3 years or even 5 years to get the “$5/mo”. Is it just me, or is that not $5/mo? That would be $300/5years, not $5/mo! The worst part is that you usually don’t realize a host is doing this until you get to the final part in the check out. Do your research! Make sure when they say $5/mo, they mean $5/mo! Not $300 for 5 years divided by 60!

I checked with several industry insiders and the rumors I’m hearing are that this service will be very accurate and fundamentally different from alexa (which ranks your site in a relative scale compared to other sites). I’m even hearing that Google plans to get the data from actual web servers (raw numbers!).

T35 is currently ranking top 5,000 on Alexa:

I wonder how well we would do when Google ranks us? One thing is for sure, this service will definitely give more ammo to the internet marketers of the ‘net.

June 30th Update: The service is officially in beta, and I have been playing around with it all evening. It looks really cool and will probably put a lot of companies out of business.

Here are some screenshots:

It still seems a little buggy, for example T35 Hosting shows up in the “Body Builder” category, and the stats don’t seem close to the actual numbers. Still, once the bugs are fixed and they are out of beta, I think this will become the premier internet marketing tool.

Digital Point:

Sitepoint:

Statcounter:

Host-Tracker:

I checked with some of the other site owners earlier in the evening and the last I heard is that it seems to be some kind of issue with theplanet’s data center. Then again, some of these sites aren’t hosted there, so I’m not sure what to make of it. If anyone knows what’s going on, please feel free to chime in!

Never the less, Microsoft has apparently been able to not only reverse the market share loss, but attain a huge gain over the last few months. To me this seems to be the result the new Vista roll out and a greater focus on security. Poking around the new IIS I also noticed the integrated features and improved focus on web 2.0. In fact, it seemed extremly easy to setup a blog service and other social network applications with the new version.

A quick check on server statistics accross the ‘net confirmed my view: The majority of blog’s and web 2.0 sites now run IIS! Based on the way things are going, Microsoft’s IIS is set to become the dominant technology for serving content on the internet within 6-12months. Sounds far fetched? Check out the netcraft chart below:

Apache — 68,155,320 — 47.73%
Microsoft — 53,017,735 — 37.13%
Google — 7,763,516 — 5.44%
Sun — 2,262,019 — 1.58%
lighttpd — 1,541,779 — 1.08%

First a little background, including the difference between unlimited and un-metered.

Unlimited space and bandwidth is something that has been around since the beginning of web hosting. A web host usually offers this as a way to attract customers, while at the same time hoping that nobody uses any significant amounts of space or bandwidth. Unfortunately, many hosts offered such a service with the intention of terminating accounts that used more than a few megabytes of space or bandwidth. Thus in the late 90’s there was a significant customer backlash to companies offering “unlimited plans”. As a result, many hosts started clarifying that they didn’t offer “unlimited plans” but instead were offering “un-metered” plans. The difference they claimed is that they just didn’t meter or keep tack of bandwidth usage on the servers.

The present day situation

Almost half a decade later, it now feels like we are experiencing a second coming of the unlimited/unmetered backlash. What’s interesting is there are companies, like T35 for example, that still offer unlimited plans without any intention of deleting accounts that use a lot of resources. In fact, many companies have found ways to offer these plans by placing restrictions on other features to keep everything balanced. At T35 Hosting for example, we limit file sizes to 512kb. That makes it hard for a customer to use tens of gigabytes of space for legitimate reasons (although we do have a few using over 10gb). Unfortunately, the hosts that have abused the unlimited/unmetered offerings seemed to have ruined it for everyone. We now find ourselves at a point where we can’t even advertise these kind of plans in some of the largest webmaster forums on the ‘net!

What now?

All of this reminds me of the automobile industry, where based on bad experiences in the 1980’s, Americans have come to associate hatchbacks with something very negative — making it very hard for any car company to successfully launch such a car. I wonder if the hosting industry has come to a point where we need to re-brand unlimited plans to something that would make them more marketable? Kind of like calling hatchbacks “sports wagons” (audi a3, etc..). What do you guys think? Are unlimited and un-metered plans still worth keeping around? Are the companies offering hundreads of gigabytes (or even Terabytes) of resources the new “unlimited” web hosts?

FortuneCity
Late 90s Alex Ranking: ~ #200 Free Hosting? 100mb	Today Alex Ranking: #1,660 Free Hosting? No
FortuneCity, founded in 1997, was one of the first free web hosting providers. They also grew to become one of the largest, consistently ranking in the top 200 web properties in the world. These days they have completely dropped their free web hosting plan (which used to be the only service they offered). Their new site looks sleek, but the paid hosting plans (and prices) are nothing to write home about.

Geocities
Late 90s Alex Ranking: ~ #100 Free Hosting? 5mb	Today Alex Ranking: #70 Free Hosting? 15mb
Geocities is perhaps one of the most well known free hosts. So popular in fact, that it eventually got Yahoo’s attention and was purchased in early 2000. Re-branded as Yahoo! Geocities, it now caters towards paid business plans, although a 15mb free hosting plan is still offered.

Hypermart
Late 90s Alex Ranking: ~ #150 Free Hosting? 75mb	Today Alex Ranking: #18,931 Free Hosting? No
Although Hypermart was relatively late to the scene in 1999, it became a quick favorite by offering a whopping 75mb of space. Unfortunately it has since stopped providing its free web hosting plan. In a somewhat botched maneuver they attempted to force-convert their free members to paid accounts. Since the late 90s they have went from being in the top 150 web properties to barely making the top 20,000.

Xoom
Late 90s Alex Ranking: ~ #500 Free Hosting? 500mb	Today Alex Ranking: #26,384 Free Hosting? No
Xoom was also a fairly popular free web host that got a significant boost when it was purchased by NBC in 2000. Unfortunately the new management had very little experience in running a web host. The company soon failed and closed up shop. The domain itself was unused for years until recently when it was purchased by paypal-like company.

Crosswinds
Late 90s Alex Ranking: ~ #1000 Free Hosting? Unlimited	Today Alex Ranking: #161,001 Free Hosting? No
A medium-sized web host, Crosswinds eventually gave up on its free hosting offerings. Today it’s a regular paid hosting provider and its rankings have consequently dropped from 1,000 to not even cracking the top 100,000. There are rumors of the company bringing back its free hosting operation, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

T35 Hosting
Late 90s Alex Ranking: ~ #2,000 Free Hosting? 35mb	Today Alex Ranking: #5,000 Free Hosting? Unlimited
Although T35 Hosting was never as big as Fortunecities and never had the financial backing of NBC-Xoom, it has surprisingly survived where most others have failed.

A quick look at this list shows a very pessimistic view of the once flourishing free hosting industry. Some of the biggest names in the industry have closed up shop and have repositioned themselves as paid hosting providers. Even companies with deep financial pockets (like NBC-Xoom) have folded under the pressure. What do you guys think? Is there one common link that caused the downfall of so many of these companies? Is this really the end of the free web hosting era? What does it take to survive as a free web host in the 21st century?