Sometimes people gets too overwhelmed with the power of Social networks. The attitude is quite correct, but there are few moments to pay attention to. The social networks are good for business in many cases, but sometimes they are just a simple waste of time and energy.

SEO with Social media are starting to go hand by hand. Google has expressed its opinion about the importance of social network and particularly Google+ in quite a clear way. If the website is shared by 10 friends, it is useful and worth higher positions in the search. If the website does not get any +1s, it may be considered as non-quality one, so you don’t have any chances. Another moment is the social search where shared websites are shown in the top. Does the company need Google+ account? Oh YES! Will Google+ bring more sales? Not really as it is still growing and developing. The presence on Google+ is more for SEO than branding and driving traffic and sales.

Facebook is about sharing the content. If you have a non-dynamic website with 5 pages about your corporate services and contact form, please do not waste your time on Facebook. You will simply make the things worse as there is a bad habit to create the Facebook Profile and leave it empty and unattended for years. Fans are not coming by themselves; they need some value, so you will need to invest your time and maybe more to the growing of your fan community. If you do not have any frequently updated content that may be difficult.

Twitter is a big question mark. It depends on your target audience – if those people use Twitter frequently for the information search and customer support related issues? If so, do it. If not, you may be leaving it for the smarter ones. The automatic RSS feeds and updates sucks and does not provide any reputation to a company’s Twitter account. Do you want to be one of them? If not, please do not waste your time.

Youtube is a huge social network which may be really helpful, but in case you have something to show. Putting your ads will not make big difference as people needs funny and creative videos. Will you invest to such videos? If yes, go ahead and use YouTube as one of your best channels. If not, leave it alone.

Flickr is yet another great social networking site which is not used well enough. If you are going to put the pictures of your team that may be helpful, but if just using as image hosting service, better not to tell you have it.

As conclusion you can see that if you will invest just a little of your time, only Google+ and Facebook is needed for your business. Others will be considered as regular spam.

CISPA is a proposed law in US government which must fight the cyber terrorism and criminals, meanwhile it allow US government to prosecute any website which may have negative influence to US security and policies by simply restricting the traffic channels to the suspected website. This means US government can simply observe the traffic data and encrypted transactions. It allows prosecuting any website which is displayed in the territory of the United States.

Fighting Cyber crimes is great, but collecting the personal data of people is not.

Host1Free is a free web hosting company which would be bombed with the requests to disclose the data of our customers. We do not want to loose our good reputation because of someone who is suspected in cyber crime or illegal online activity. This legislature may be crucial for us and our respected competitors as well. It may destroy the freedom of the internet as all the websites with different opinion may face the fierce pressure to limit their traffic in the particular countries. That means that one day we may see not “Under construction” note, but the note saying that this website is not available in your country because the people associated with it are suspected in cyber crime. If Gmail will be used for illegal information purposes, will they ban Google?

Please support the freedom of internet by protesting against CISPA, SOPA, PIPA and all the other acts from US government which want to limit the access to information and freedom of speech. Please express your opinion to your local representative even though you are not US citizen. US trends are coming to other countries later, so be prepared to defend the freedom of internet in your country.

Advice 1. Do not worry about the technical staff member. If you can set a blog by yourself, you will be able to start your business yourself. Instead of 3 months of programmer search, you should be focusing on spreading your idea and participating in the startuper community events to raise some funds.

Advice 2. Create a website for your startup. Register the domain name and set a simple and free WordPress theme. Free hosting account is enough (web hosting or free VPS) to host it, so your expenses will be the first year domain registration fee. The website can be a single page with some text and links to your online presentation or video with the description of the idea. Also create a special email form to collect the email database of those who want notifications when your startup will be up.

Advice 3. Focus on open source technologies; try different CMS (content management systems) or e-commerce solutions. Your free hosting account is a perfect place for your training ground. Be prepared to face the difficulties and spend some time reading manuals or forum discussions. You are starting without your CTO which needs to be found (do not forget mentioning that you are looking for one in your website). Your experience will be helpful when you will be explaining programmer what features you really need for the start.

Advice 4. Use your domain email instead of free webmail (Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail). With the purchase of your domain name you have already started building your online personality. Using the specific email in your communication will let people know what you are really doing. It will help to the website. Free hosting account may be suitable for one email address, so if you need more space, try using POP mail or order Premium webhosting plan with unlimited inboxes and space for your emails.

Advice 5. Startup is a starting business; therefore you need to learn some technical issues about the website management, work flow, project management, accounting software, collaboration solutions, SEO, online marketing, affiliate marketing, traffic generating ways and many other issues. Just reserve 2 hours every Wednesday or Thursday for learning and in a few month you will become almost professional Webmaster (professional ones have knowledge + experience).

Those five advices are helpful to people working in all the areas, no matter if they are going to sell candies, or start a new cloud based accounting software for countries with unstable tax system.

Domain names are the real property which can be bought and later sold for double, triple, tenfold price and even more. It depends how good the domain name is. For example you have noticed that domain realestateguru.com has expired. You bought it as low as $10. What’s next? You do not intend to create your real estate agency, therefore you have some options:

1. Lend this domain to someone who will make the real estate website and profit from the “rent fee”, which can be 5-10% from the revenue.
2. Sell it to someone in Webmaster forum for a double or triple price ($30).
3. Keep it for future, nourish with content and try building a small website with backlinks and PageRank.

We would recommend the third option. Keep your domain with some content, make it alive and in few years it may be worth $1000 dollars. That’s a great investment as your expenses are for domain name. You will need to host it somewhere, so we suggest hosting it at Host1Free for $0 per year. That’s a great deal as we will not add any ads or irritating pop-up or javascript to benefit from your website.

All you need to do is register a free web hosting account, associate the domain with it and host it using a simple WordPress or Drupal CMS or even use our Website Builder. You will need to add a few additional pages in a year, so Google will see the movement and updates. Then work with some linking strategies. The simplest one is getting the links from other of your domains. In couple of yours you will have some backlinks from the related content and Pagerank, also it will be old website, thus valued by Google. You will need adding a simple note that this domain is for sale and leave your contacts (Host1Free account also provides webmail, so you will be able to use it). Seems like a fair way to make your domain earning you the money. With a website the property will grow and you will be able to benefit from a single domain name.

If you have lots of domains and need more space and features, we have a Premium hosting plan with unlimited IPs and databases, so you will be able to host as many domains as you wish.

Both WebsiteBuilder and WordPress are for the early beginners. If you do not know anything about the website and link structure, the Website builder may be a great option to create one. It also allows choosing some designs for your corporate website. All you need to do is uploading the logo and choosing the layout. Then adding some pages and texts. After that you will have a simple website of few pages.

Wordpress is designed for informational websites’ publishing, so they are used for frequently updated content websites. If you intend to add news or pictures every day, this CMS is the most appropriate one.

Does it mean that WebsiteBuiler is losing its capabilities and cannot compete with modern CMS? Definitely not. The free hosting accounts provide little space and resources, therefore small websites are the best option here. Also if you have a spare domain name, you can make a simple website and keep it alive by adding some information for search engines. One day it may become a great investment.

Advice No. 1. Observe your bandwidth daily. The saving starts from the in-depth analysis on cutting the costs. That principle is valid in any business and life. The same can be applied in free hosting. All you need to do in the first place is login to your hosting provider account and check the server statistics. If everything runs normally, you will see the stable chart flows. If something is wrong and unusual, you will see a steep rise of resource usage on particular day. Please check the website stats on that day and you will see what page generated you most bandwidth. You have located the problem, haven‘t you? It‘s time to solve it!

Advice No. 2. Check the disk space. The disk space is not unlimited. Usually free hosting provides 2-5 GB of free disk space. That is more than enough for a single website, however this amount can be not substantial for few email boxes, if you intend saving messages on server. The disk space should be used wisely. It is recommended not to turn your free hosting account into online drive for full size pictures, music and movie clips. Every time you will access them, your bandwidth can be wasted and the website will go down. The main issues are related to images. The main way to save disk space – make images for the web instead of putting 1 MB size picture and decrease it online using website CMS.

Advice No. 3. Optimize your website. Optimization is a key procedure for all the websites. Badly optimized website can crash the Premium hosting plan, not speaking about the free one. What is optimization? Optimization is the few technical tricks which makes the website lighter and working more rapidly because of saved space and simplified code. If your website used Javascripts, optimization is a need as one day they might burry it down. Even WordPress blog needs optimization as some of plugins are using third party resources (the most popular and the most wasteful is All in One SEO pack plugin). Get rid of unused plugins, take care of website cache, optimize the database and your website will be running much faster and using less server resources and less bandwidth.

If you can manage all these three issues, you will not have troubles with your 100 GB/month bandwidth ever.

What will be included in the Free VPS?

• 128MB RAM for each VPS;
• 10GB Disk Space (dedicated);
• Unlimited Bandwidth;
• OpenVZ Powered Virtualization;
• High Availability;
• Tons of OS Templates;
• SolusVM as Control Panel;

All free VPS servers will have the ability to upgrade to premium cloud vps hosting without any downtime and the transfer will be one by the premium hosting support members. Depending on the amount of data the migration process can take from 15 minutes up to 2 hours (MAX.).
The idea of launching free VPS is to make the best environment for expansions and get the opportunity to see how our new cloud powered system can handle so many servers on one cloud. As you aware the free hosting solution is based on cloud computing and it works pretty well, in two years time we have done many optimizations and got a very good knowledge in administrating large systems. Right now we want to step into next level where we would see how good we are on doing VPS’es for masses! Once again, get started and give us your LIKE in Host1Free.com Facebook page! The announcements for free VPS will be announced in Host1Free.com Facebook page only!

Question #2: Why Host1Free.com does not have the live chat?
Answer: We would love to, but shouldn’t we share all the information publicly, so that every single customer could find the answers much quicker?

Question #3: Will Host1Free.com will remain free forever?
Answer: Absolutely, we will keep all the services provided by Host1Free.com for free F-O-R-E-V-E-R!

Question #4: What will be the configuration for free VPS?
Answer: We will provide one configuration for free VPS, which will be 128MB RAM, 10GB Disk space, Xeon CPU, Unlimited bandwidth. The actual free VPS will be based on OpenVZ virtualization and driven by SolusVM. The setup will be instant!

Question #5: When I will be able to get my free VPS?
Answer: Next week, well ok, The date will be announced on Tuesday, but this definitely will going to be happen next week.

I hope these Q/A will help you to give the idea what it is going to be happen next week. Please share this information with all of your friends, we have enough resources to give free VPS to everyone! Do you think it is a huge statement? I do not think so, because Host1Free.com is simply the best!

• More than double servers were attached to the network.
• Content review system introduced to zero traffic websites.
• CloudLinux deployed in all of the servers.
• More stability to the network.

We are now started to make a new roadmap for upcoming year what should be offered new in Host1Free.com and the most excited feature will be FREE VPS! Yes, that is what we going to offer! More about it I will provide in my next post, but I can surely give you some overview about it. Basically, we will offer low end vps servers based on OpenVZ with 128MB RAM and 10GB of disk space. The free VPS will be only one plan and it will have about 5 OS templates…
The other thing that we will offer in Host1Free is easy migration service from your free web hosting account to premium web hosting. After the upgrade of your premium web hosting account, you will have a link where it will transfer your web hosting account instantly, the only thing you will have to do is to change your DNS records to the existing server, that is it!
We are very happy proving you the best web hosting absolutely for free! That is why we brainstorm every day how to make Host1Free better for your website. By the way, we would be very happy that you put some of your effort for better free web hosting, being more active in Host1Free forum and suggest features that we could offer for your website.
Oh, I forgot to make a really drastic statement, that we also planned to be the first free web hosting service in the Internet! In order to make this achievement, we need your help, only with you guys we can become the only free web hosting that deserves to be called THE BEST!