Profitting from free webhosting

The majority of the hosting companies use free hosting to introduce their services, and as an entry point to their more expensive offerings. Generally they recoup their costs in one of a few ways:

• Advertising - Selling online advertising on the customer sites is generally considered a fair trade - the reasoning is that high traffic sites are more expensive to host, but the additional traffic allows for additional ad impressions therefore covering the cost. For the web master, it can be a good trade if the advertising is of good quality and non-competitive. This is one of the main reasons that businesses do not use free hosting for their website. The majority of free hosting companies use this method.

• Referrals - Using a simple form of viral marketing, these providers rely on the users to spread the offer. The ratio of free to paid accounts is known, and by having each free user refer a number of friends, the hosting provider is able to get enough paid accounts to cover the cost.

• Resell Hosting - This is where someone starts up a hosting company, attracts lots of visitors, then sells the hosting company to someone else once it can no longer support itself. Once sold, this individual uses the money to start up multiple hosting ventures and sells each in turn.

Some hosting companies are using hybrid approaches that mix these tactics.

Free web hosting service

A free web hosting service is a web hosting service that is free, usually advertisement-supported. Free web hosts will usually provide a subdomain (yoursite.example.com) or a directory (www.example.com/~yourname). In contrast, paid web hosts will usually provide a second-level domain along with the hosting (www.yourname.com). Many free hosts do allow use of separately-purchased domains. Rarely, a free host may also operate as a domain name registrar.

Root Zone Database

The Root Zone Database represents the delegation details of top-level domains, including gTLDs such as “.COM”, and country-code TLDs such as “.UK”. As the manager of the DNS root zone, IANA is responsible for coordinating these delegations in accordance with its policies and procedures.

Document classification

Document classification/categorization is a problem in information science. The task is to assign an electronic document to one or more categories, based on its contents. Document classification tasks can be divided into two sorts: supervised document classification where some external mechanism (such as human feedback) provides information on the correct classification for documents, and unsupervised document classification, where the classification must be done entirely without reference to external information. There is also a semi-supervised document classification, where parts of the documents are labeled by the external mechanism.

Pseudo-domains

Several networks, such as BITNET, CSNET or other UUCP networks, existed that were in wide-spread use among computer professionals and academic users, that were incompatible with the Internet and exchanged e-mail with the Internet via special e-mail gateways. For relaying purposes on the gateways, messages associated with these networks were labeled with suffixes such as bitnet, oz, csnet, or uucp, but these domains did not exist as top-level domains in the public Domain Name System of the Internet.

Most of these networks have long since ceased to exist, and although UUCP still gets significant use in parts of the world where Internet infrastructure has not yet become well-established, it subsequently transitioned to using Internet domain names, so pseudo-domains now largely survive as historical relics. One notable exception is the 2007 emergence of SWIFTNet Mail, which uses the swift pseudo-domain.^[14]

The top-level pseudo domain local is required by the Zeroconf protocol. It is also used by many organizations internally, which may become a problem for those users as Zeroconf becomes more popular. Both site and internal have been suggested for private usage, but no consensus has emerged^{[citation needed]}.

The anonymity network Tor has a top-level pseudo-domain onion, which can only be reached with a Tor client because it uses the Tor-protocol (onion routing) to reach the hidden service in order to protect the anonymity of users.

Alternative DNS roots

ICANN's slow progress in creating new generic top-level domains, and the high application costs associated with TLDs, contributed to the creation of alternate DNS roots with different sets of top-level domains. Such domains may be accessed by configuration of a computer with alternate or additional (forwarder) DNS servers or plugin modules for web browsers. Browser plugins detect alternate root domain requests and access an alternate domain name server for such requests.

Proposed domains

About the time that ICANN discussed and finally introduced^[8] aero, biz, coop, info, museum, name, and pro TLDs, site owners argued that a similar TLD should be made available for adult and pornographic websites to settle the dispute of obscene content on the Internet and the responsibility of service providers under the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Several options were proposed including xxx, sex and adult, but ICANN has not created any.^[9]

An older proposal^[10] consisted of seven new gTLDs arts, firm, info, nom, rec, shop, and web. Later biz, info, museum, and name covered most of these old proposals.

During the 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting in Paris in 2008,^[11] ICANN started a new process of TLD naming policy to take a "significant step forward on the introduction of new generic top-level domains." This program envisions the availability of many new or already proposed domains, as well a new application and implementation process.^[12] Observers believed that the new rules could result in hundreds of new gTLDs to be registered.^[13] Proposed TLDs include music, berlin and nyc.