FreePgs.com Forum

We will be increasing our annual fee for account renewal starting next year to cover more of the costs to provide this hosting.

Currently, less than 1/6 of the cost of providing this service is being obtained from the annual fees.

The fees were kept low since the service was originally a free provider.  We wanted to keep a cheap option available to users, but we are no longer to continue paying for this service as we are now.

It is possible we could also have different annual fees based on the number of active domains, or based on traffic (at levels), or some other factor, that way those that hardly use their account will not be paying as much as others that have a large number of domains or high traffic sites running.

Please respond with any ideas and/or to express your feelings about this matter.

Thank you,
FreePgs.com Admin

10usd a year is no more than fair. Payment on usage is also fair.
Hoewever, I have paid up front until 2015, what will happen in this case?

You will continue to be paid to 2015.  This will only affect future payments.

How was this being funded previously?

It was originally funded by ads.  Since that stopped it has been funded by me personally, a few donations, the $3 fees, and the upgrades that were done.

Thank you for the years of fun and good service

I personally have tried many times to make money and so send money to the owner of this amazing service but find i am crap at it should i make some i will remember who hosted all my rubbish while i tried for years and Many thanks goes to you the hosting king.

Apart from the spam email lol

Mike

Quote from: admin on August 31, 2011, 07:25:14 PM
It was originally funded by ads.  Since that stopped it has been funded by me personally, a few donations, the $3 fees, and the upgrades that were done.

Why can't you go back to the old model? What was wrong with it to start with?

Because we don't offer a free service with ads anymore.

Having users placing our ad on their sites didn't work out very well, as adsense terminated our account a few years ago because of content of some of the sites or the fact they showed up on error pages, etc.

If they question is why we don't offer a free service, it was because of the constant RIAA notices, fraudulent phishing sites being created, problem scripts, and other undesirable content that gets uploaded.

$10 seems reasonable.  I hardly get any traffic or try and promote my site but, I do use the space for personal or community reasons. Thank for this service it has been very usefull.

$10 seems reasonable to me.

Would there be any changes to the storage upgrade fees? Typically I have just gone for the $15 1GB upgrade + 1 year renewal whenever it is time to renew.

There are no plans to change the storage upgrade fees at this time.

I will say this, if I can get on my feet with several projects that I am working on (and yes, it's a long shot that I'll hit it big) I will defintely throw some cash your way.

your service has been a part of my life for a long time and I appreciate the fact that you are still around.

IF you have a specific link that you want promoted with a particular saying let me know, I often make comments on various bogs etc, I don't mind spreading the word.

I'm not a big fan of facebook, and don't hardly use it, but there's 750,000 that do; it wouldn't hurt to twitter and facebook your services to try and drum up some new business.

$10 a year is quite fair.

I agree to pay more, but only if the service is getting better (or will get), which I think it will, so yes, and thanks.

It makes sense,

--Jon

$10 sounds fair to me too. I'm fine with payment based on active domain also. how about $2 per domain + surcharge for higher traffic volume?

Yes, that would be a fair approach.

We may do something similar, or at least different rates based on the number of domains (1-3, 4-9, etc).

Quote from: admin on September 01, 2011, 03:45:41 AM
Yes, that would be a fair approach.

We may do something similar, or at least different rates based on the number of domains (1-3, 4-9, etc).

I'd be quite content with this approach (or a similar tiered structure), as I only use my site very little, and at $10 it begins approaching not-worth-it territory for me.

$10 a year is very fair.

$10 a year is fine to me.

$10 sounds like it's still a deal to me.

$10 still is a great deal!  Thanks for continuing to support us and our sites!

I don't think that the old freepgs hosting ever had free ads.  It was just a one off payment.

Perhaps an option would be to offer a reduced annual fee if for example pre-paying a number of years in advance, may be something to consider.

Having been with the service for nearly a decade now, when it was free, even before the fire, I know that it's never going to get any cheaper. As little as I use it now (since I'm not all that fond of Plesk), $10/yr starts to get towards the end of what I'd like to pay. If I was using the site a lot, then it would be an incredible bargain. But for two or three static domain pages, it begins to be a luxury. I would grudgingly go along with $10, since I'm too lazy to move the domains, but if it goes up again, I'd have to seriously reconsider it.

mcarp555,
Thank you for the input.  It is for this reason we are considering a tiered approach.

jazzyman,
We originally had no ads, but prior to there being a setup fee, we used to have an account type called "Linked" that the user was required to place either a text ad on their site or our banner ad.

I am good with $10 also. I really like your services.

$10 a year sounds about right. Although in my experience, FreePgs has always had issues with uptime. I'd always figured that had something to do with the old "one-time fee" model, and the $3 annual charge seemed like an extension of that to keep the service on life support. Is this just a reaction to increased costs, or can we hope for at least a little bit of improvement?

The uncapped bandwidth, generous space allocation and low fees were what attracted me in the first place. If the service were tiered, this would certainly change my outlook on the service.

I'd be pretty fine with $10, tiered does not sound attractive to me.

$10 per year is a fair amount
&/or I would be willing to pay a tiered amount based on usage

$10 per year would still very good for what we get and if that is still is not enough to cover all the costs I would be happy to pay based on usage. To be honest the $3 a year was ridiculously cheap.

Better performance will come from knocking some of the highest CPU and I/O users off the systems.  On each server, there are 1 or 2 users that consume 95% or more of the resources on a continued basis.  This is typically caused by inefficient scripts, poorly indexed tables, or poorly designed queries.

We went through Plesk5 and cleaned up some dormant sites that had turned into spammers havens (old forums and CMS scripts where comments and posts were continually posted with links - but no actual content existed for over a year).  This improved performance by a large margin.

We will most likely do the same for 4 and 6.

The Plesk4 server is quite a bit older than 5 and 6.  We are either going to remove it from service or bring up another server in that location to serve clients in those areas.

If you are located in the US, Canada, or anywhere in Europe, the Plesk 5 and 6 servers will provide much improved uptime and performance over Plesk 4.

Also, we have recently adjusted the statistics run time on the Plesk5 server to interfere less with those in the EU region.

I have a question...I went to the Plesk 5 page....it used to have a place to show when our next payment was due, but I can't find it now for the life of me...I sure don't want to miss a payment, whatever you all decide to do.  I not only have my site here, but I store some files that I don't have as part of the site, but just backed up.  This is a great service and I've been a satisfied customer for some time.

pixie,
Since the upgrade of the Plesk5 server to Plesk 10.x, it dropped the expiration dates from the tables.  We will need to go through your payments to figure out what you are paid to and apply that to your subscriptions if that has not already been done for your domain.

Please email plesk at lvcs dot net to have this reviewed.

paying 10 dollars is reasonable. When it comes to paying more for domains this would suck for me because I buy domains out of the blue when I have an idea and then lose all interest in the project afterwards XD. I have 4 domains and they total 0.12mb of bandwidth a month currently. Like others have said if I were to hit it big with a domain I would be more than happy to donate a good deal of cash.

Thank you for the input.

We would never charge per domain, but only the tier of the account (that would allow 6 domains, 12 domains, etc.)

Of course, you can add an unlimited number of domain aliases to an existing domain and that would not count toward your domain limit.

We would most likely go with traffic or disk space as a tiered method as that would be more reasonable (if we had to use the tiered method at all that is).

i would go for $6, $10 is a bit high for me

I am fine for both USD6 or USD10.
Please keep on this great hosting! thanks! ;D

Another voice that thinks $3 was ridiculously cheap. By all means, make it $10/year - I would still consider that cheap.

The main benefit I get from Freepgs is the uncapped bandwidth: I host a bunch of (my own) electronic art to share with the world and I go for a year at a time with only mild interest in(/access to) my web pages - and then one of my things gets published somewhere prominent and suddenly I get tens of thousands of hits in a few weeks. And I really like that I don't have to worry about those moments in terms of hitting some kind of BW limit or such. I'm not aware of any other place that gives me this kind of flexibility.

I too am more than happy paying the $10/year

I'm unsure how comfortable I am with pay-for-usage, to be honest. I use up anywhere from 2-3 GB a month in bandwidth and I'm unsure if I would be paying a lot for it. However, given that the service is so cheap, I am able and willing to pay three times as much.

The best option is paying for usage: number of domains, disk usage and traffic.
$10 / year is really too much for the usage I do in my case. Between $3 and $6, in my case would be better.
The traffic from my only one domain is really low, and the disk usage I'm using too, so if the fee is increasing too much, I will be quitting unfortunately :(

Quote from: admin on September 01, 2011, 05:18:07 PM
pixie,
Since the upgrade of the Plesk5 server to Plesk 10.x, it dropped the expiration dates from the tables.  We will need to go through your payments to figure out what you are paid to and apply that to your subscriptions if that has not already been done for your domain.

Please email plesk at lvcs dot net to have this reviewed.

Thanks, doing that now.

I hope service does not terminate, I rely on it!

i hope U$10.00 per year is enough to keep it great service.

and i would gladly pay 10 bucks / year.

Hi, my usage on storage and bandwidth is low either. Currently, I can afford the maximum of USD 10 / year. Of course, if it is less than $10, it will be better.

Thank you for providing the low cost service for so many years.

Best regards,
Lee.

I would be more than happy to pay $10 a year. I hardly use my website. This would keep it affordable to me to continue to have hosting. If the price were to increase significantly, I would probably give up on my hardly used site.

I have 4 acc. on freepgs.. Till the fire, I got quite a lot bandwidth use but since all the user uploaded files were gone and wasn't possible to backup all, I stopped my site and now it is in the idle mode.. Other 2 were for some projects which I could never completed, so they are in the idle mode too.. (I have paid $3 per acc. for 4-5 years not to lose them) The last one is in use and have 5% of BW & Disk used monthly..
So.. If it is 10, 3x10=$30 will be much for me for idle sites.. I don't want to lose them though.. OK, $3 is low but $10 is much.. So, let the fee rely on BW used and I pay for what I use and don't pay same for which I don't use..

Quote from: joshqune on September 12, 2011, 07:30:30 PM
I have 4 acc. on freepgs.. Till the fire, I got quite a lot bandwidth use but since all the user uploaded files were gone and wasn't possible to backup all, I stopped my site and now it is in the idle mode.. Other 2 were for some projects which I could never completed, so they are in the idle mode too.. (I have paid $3 per acc. for 4-5 years not to lose them) The last one is in use and have 5% of BW & Disk used monthly..
So.. If it is 10, 3x10=$30 will be much for me for idle sites.. I don't want to lose them though.. OK, $3 is low but $10 is much.. So, let the fee rely on BW used and I pay for what I use and don't pay same for which I don't use..

If you combine all your accounts in to one account, you'd only have to pay the fee once...

$10/year still sounds like a great deal!

The site I set up in 2005 has never used a large amount of bandwidth. However, an annual fee of $10 is not excessive and I would like to keep the site as it receives a steady stream of traffic from search engines. A tiered approach seem like fair compromise.

We have decided that the new FreePgs annual fee will be $6 per year.  Please see the new post regarding this and post replies there.

Thank you,
FreePgs Admin