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[lawndar2]

I think this place has one of the best free hosting services out there. But I think there's one area that could use a little improvement

So.. I came to this host after having problems with a few others. I'd like to make it clear that you guys were not my first choice when searching through your competition for free hosting on google because your free hosting didn't seem any better than anyone else's from what I was seeing.

But once I came around here, I found the place really nice and easy to work with, and then needed support, which I got without much trouble. In fact, your support is the best free hosting's support that I have experienced so far.

While I was setting up my site, I really liked the unlimited bandwidth thing, but I was honestly surprised that you'd limit free accounts to 1gb of disk space. With modern websites, that 's kinda silly, and when looking for a host, that came into play for me, because I'm running a forum and don't know how big the data there might grow to be.

And then, while wandering around and messing with my site, I read somewhere that you guys give free unlimited disk space to free accounts who need it and qualify. This is amazing. There's only one problem here... I never knew until I stumbled across it in an obscure forum post or something that I don't even remember how to find. This is one of the key points of your service, yet most of your potential users never learn about it when browsing for a free host....
I BET YOU NOTICED THIS, DIDN'T YOU?
See, that feature should have been advertised like this^^ up on your main page for all of the noobs to see. I think this could earn you a lot more business. I hope that helps

 

[essellar]

Unmetered (not actually unlimited) disk space and bandwidth are "killer features", but stressing them too much causes a great deal of misunderstanding and problems. People have an uncanny knack for accepting terms and conditions they've never read, as well as for reading only those things in a features list that appeal to them.

The initial cap was put into place after I joined (although, honestly, it wouldn't have made a difference — as an "unfrozen caveman developer", I still tend to think of 100MB as an enormous amount of space and 100KB page weight as a potential problem to be fixed). The moment the cap-and-upgrade system was introduced, the help forum began to fill up with complaints from people who read "unlimited", signed up for accounts, and found that they couldn't back up their entire hard drive or store their music/movie collection online ("not for sharing", of course) or what have you. Even now, the majority of upgrade requests are disqualified because the account space is largely being used for file storage or almost entirely for media (there's a hard 1GB limit for media galleries even after the data cap is lifted). The cap at least mitigates the damage.

By the way, 1GB is an awful lot of data. In terms of text, it's about 3 Encylopædias Brittanica (cut that down to two to allow for ridiculous amounts of metadata, or one-and-a-half for ridiculous amounts of metadata plus meticulous semantic markup and the overhead of a script to serve it). Or something in excess of 2500 properly-prepared full-screen images (where "full screen" means 2048 native pixels on the long edge, which is actually bigger than the 1080p screen most people have, and "properly-prepared" means JPEGs with no discernible compression artifacts but minimum file size). "Modern web site" doesn't change any of that. (In fact, the semantic elements of HTML 5, styling hooks and selectors of CSS 3 and a more uniform JS API across browsers mean that "modern web sites" can be significantly smaller than their counterparts of only a few years ago.) The disk-eater for most sites is media and downloadable files, and both of those are restricted here under the Terms of Service.