Do Web Hosting Providers Give Free Stuff?

The web hosting industry is known for its cut-throat competition over pricing, especially with cloud hosting becoming popular. But there are many web hosts who silently and humbly provide free services and advise to many organisations that deserve it. This article lists some of the ways in which many local providers help to get organizations and businesses online.

Social Service Organizations

If you are a social service organization, approaching a local hoster may help you get a free account. Some may expect a back link to their website while some prefer to remain anonymous. The decision to give free hosting to a social service organization is based upon many factors including whether the organization deserves it, whether the host has adequate resources available on their servers and even who is chairing or managing the organization. The last thing a web host wants is to give free services to a defunct organization which has stopped adding value to society.

Educational and Scientific Conferences

Educational and scientific conferences are also amongst the top choices for handing out free services. Technical conferences related to the physical sciences and educational innovations readily get their web hosting sponsored. From conferences about Aboriginal Dogs, to Particle Physics, you will notice in the event souvenir that hosting for the event website is almost always sponsored. This is mainly due to the fact that web hosts prefer to provide hosting for such short-term events where there is no long term commitment and after a year, the website is usually taken down. This allows for the space to be allocated to different people or groups for different events.

Technical Advice

A small or medium sized web host may even advise clients on where they are going wrong or how they can optimize their website. Web hosts give this free advise when they see that a client is really doing something wrong or when a client specifically requests some help. Although this is not part of a web hosts job, most of them would be more than happy to share their knowledge and help your business or website to gain success. A web hosting company we know, helped to setup internal servers and network for a scientific museum by advising them on critical matters and the layout of their network. The entire networking and connectivity was planned by the web host pro bono publico. They chose to remain anonymous and did not want any publicity or praise for it. Infact, they even helped test out the facility and also helped to shortlist the IT vendors.

Website Recovery

In an emergency facing your website or office network, your hoster maybe the best friend whom you maybe able to turn to. Although it is not a Web Hosting Providers job to administer your account or take backups, they maybe the most competent and most helpful in such a situation. They usually have redundant space and bandwidth to allow you to take backups even of your local data which is not hosted with them. A loyal customer was once having a virus issue in his office and wanted to clean install all the office machines. His file storage server was also one of the machines he suspected was infected with the virus. We helped him backup the files to our server and also assisted in restoring them.

Although these gestures may not be done on a routine or regular basis, if you are a friendly customer of a friendly web host, you may just get a helping hand when all other options fail. Being in the good books of your hoster may be really useful after all.