by H Douglas Forbes

Created on: October 26, 2009   Last Updated: October 28, 2009

TANSTAAFL is an old acronym, dating back to the World Depression of the 1930's,and later popularized by Grand Master Nebula for Lifetime Achievement Award winner author Robert A Heinlein in the novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch was the original saying which was later shortened to its present state. The "free lunch" refers to the nineteenth century practice where saloons would offer a free lunch to all the beer or liquor drinkers. Naturally the cost of the "free" food was hidden in the price charged for the alcohol, thus there was no free lunch.

The same thing is done by those proclaiming to give or receive "Free Hosting". I have used several Blog hosts that claimed to be free, and later investigated many more who have made similar claims. To date I have been unable to find any who live up to the title of "Free Host", though I am sure many of you are already planning to prove me wrong. I welcome such criticisms and eagerly await the first one that holds up to close examination.

You just need to ask yourself why anyone would offer you free hosting? Hosting a website, let alone thousands or as in some cases, millions, is not a cheap endeavor. So not only why would they be free, how could they be free?

Some are perfectly open and forward with how they are earning money from you, they may have banners or other advertising they earn from. These I will not really dwell on as I am sure you all know the type-they have PPC ads or other forms of advertising they directly earn from, often under the guise of shared income. Then there are others that are much more subtle in how the earn from you.

The point of this article though, is not to highlight all the different ways that "Free Hosts" make money from you but to make you aware of one of the hidden expenses of using "Free Hosting". The one I discuss here seems to be a contradiction, as the more successful your website is, the more money you will lose if you use "Free Hosting".

The use of AdSense or any of the great AdSense alternatives is a very common thing among Bloggers and Webmasters world wide-some estimates I have read state that 50,000 new Bloggers join AdSense monthly. There are also dozens of other ad agencies, though only the better ones have the hidden cost-another contradiction.

The Advertisers of the world long ago decided -based on actual ROI ( Return On Investment) figures, that the traffic free hosted websites receive is of lesser quality than that of "real websites". Please hold the cards and letters of protest-yes I fully understand that there are many fine exceptions, however industry wide the facts are very clear. Ads on free hosted websites convert much less often then those on "real websites".

Knowing this, firms like AdSense have a running scale of costs to the advertisers so that they pay less for ads on lower quality sites. They bid on a "maximum cost" basis, so a click on a particular ad on a free hosted site, and a click on the same ad on a "real website" with the same traffic numbers etc will pay very different amounts.

Actual testing by the author has discovered that the range is 20 to 60 percent which means that a site with proper SEO and a real host may be paid $1.00 for a certain ad click, while the same ad on a free hosted site will only receive between 40 and 80 cents.

This can very soon add up to very significant money, many sites receive hundreds if not thousands of clicks on their ads per month. If each one of those clicks paid even another 20 percent, it takes very few to pay the cost of a "Real Website"

"Free" Hosts? a Myth.

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