Free cPanel Hosting with no advertising... sounds great doesn't it?

Too bad that most free cPanel free hosts shut down in a short amount of time compared to other free hosts, but why? Why do they shut down so quickly? Put simply... money. cPanel is a commercial product that costs hundreds of dollars per year and even with price breaks for multiple licenses and discounts, it still can cost a lot as each server must have a separate cPanel license.

I've been in the free hosting business for quite some time now, worked with many successful web hosts and out of all the ones that provide cPanel to its users on a free hosting plan, I know of only one or two that have found a business model to support the service and even then they are still rather shaky in spite of the limits they put on their free cPanel hosting plan. So why? Why does it work for some and fail for others leaving you, the user, high and dry with no hosting?

Put bluntly, the no advertising free cPanel hosts in most cases cut their own legs out from under them by denying themselves the revenue stream of advertising to cover the licensing and server costs and most collapse within the first year under mounds of debt. If you do indeed find a free cPanel webhost with no ads, it would be in your best interest to seriously consider how they make money if not through advertising otherwise you may just end up losing your site, your credibility to your users and if you run a business, sales.

That's why I personally recommend avoiding those free cPanel hosts unless they have proven themselves in the market either by including advertising on user webpages or perhaps by including limits such as lower quotas on disk space or bandwidth, limiting what countries it accepts users from (eg. UK and United States only), or requiring users to complete special offers prior to being able to signup or to continue their free hosting, or even a combination of the above or other methods.

So when you're in the market for free web hosting, don't automatically leap on that free cPanel hosting with no ads option, at least not without doing considerable research into how the company supports itself, how long its been around, what features it has and doesn't have and most definitely, check the Terms of Service as a lot of them hide limitations and requirements in there, such as signing you up for junk mail and selling your personal information to third parties.