Uttesh asked me a Question : Hi, amit i was browsing a web forum and came through a section where they were many free web hosting for life offers and some real cheap hosting offers, are these legit?

Answer : The first thing which comes to my mind is ‘You get what you pay for‘.
There are numerous business strategies different web hosts run in order to gain business. Here are some of those based on which you can consider these web hosting offers to be legit/scams.

• Some reputed Domain name registrars like Godaddy.com offer Free Web Hosting services with every domain name registered and many customers think that this would be a real offer and signup with the same. But when the signup is completed you will get a Ad-supported web hosting services huge ads on the top header section of your website, which clearly says that you would lost 75% of any revenue/visitors from your website because of these adverts. Make sure you always signup with a paid hosting service with a budget hosting company in order to keep your costs low rather than signing up with ad-supported free hosting services from companies like Godaddy.
• Some people try to promote web hosting affiliate programs and try to say that they are going to offer complete free web hosting accounts etc, but they dont reveal the truth that after a very small period the hosting company starts charging you and if not paid your account gets suspended making you lose your website content in case of termination or downtime in case of suspension, meanwhile the referring guy would have already recieved his affiliate commission.
• Some Web Hosting companies which offer 100% free web hosting services add a iframe / footer coder in all your pages and run adverts/ sponsored links or run CPM based ads on your websites in order to make money by hosting your websites. This is quite a good business policy because everyone cannot build websites which can get huge hits, but if you can lease a cheap server and offer free web hosting with cpm ads all over the member websites you can make a lot more easy money which just keeps increasing with the number of members
• Some web hosting companies like servage.net offer real cheap hosting accounts like 510 Gb Web Hosting Space + 5010 Gb Bandwidth and a free domain name at just 7$/month and do you really think is possible for any web hosting company to offer? This blog is hosted on a dedicated server with 250 Gb Space + 2000 Gb Bandwidth and with a server management the total cost comes to around 500$/month. How on the earth can some offer twice the features at fraction of the cost? is it really feasible or is it a scam? Well the answer is simple these guys dont offer everything what they claim and the moment your website starts getting some traffic they start suspending your account, making you to either continue with frequent downtimes or else you will have to move all your data to another web hosting company making you lost time and resources with some downtime.

Web Hosting Company Selection Tips : When ever you are signing up with a Web hosting service make sure you give a search for the hosting company and add a word ’sucks’ to the company name to read more reviews example :
HostGator HostGator Reviews HostGator Sucks
DreamHost DreamHost Reviews DreamHost Sucks
Servage Servage Reviews Servage Sucks
The Company name search would guide you to more information about the company, their buzz in the web and general information, The reviews search will generally lead to most affiliated websites which try to add good reviews of all the top web hosting companies and try their best to get conversions and make affiliate commissions. The most important search would the ‘Sucks’ keyword because this can lead you to the most real reviews where in web hosting users post their real feedback and review with their experiance about these hosting companies and their recommendations.

Suggestion : If you still have a doubt about a web hosting company, make sure you signup with webhostingtalk.com and get professional advice, since its one of the best hosting related forum in the web.