DevHub – Free Web Hosting

If you don’t think that you are ready to manage your own website, don’t worry. There are solutions for you that eliminate the need to touch any of the technical aspects of owning and operating your own website. With such services all you have to do is share your passion, and the rest will take care of itself.

DebHubLink is a rather young free web service and webhost, that lets you create custom websites in a super easy and user friendly fashion. Think of it along the lines of Squidoo or HubPages. However, with DevHub you will be able to instantly create full websites, either on a subdomain (yoursite.devhub.com) or simply by pointing your own domain to your hosting account with them.

Both of these options seem pointless to a new user, but both are in your favor. First they give you a subdomain if you don’t have a domain.

A subdomain is an extension of their own domain as I illustrated in the example above. But more importantly, the search engines treat it more like an independent domain name. This keeps your website from being added into all of the other websites hosted by DevHub. This is in your benefit, because you will be ranked on your content rather than a combination of all other content they host.

Even more impressive is that they allow you to point your own domain name to your site. This is an advanced feature, one that other services would charge you for. What this allows you to do is brand your site and give it a finished feel. Instead of yoursite.devhub.com, you could rather have yoursite.com. This is much easier for your readers to remember. But more importantly, if you ever decide to move your site to another host, you have the ability to direct the traffic you worked for to your new host.

If you decide to use DevHub, I would highly suggest that you buy a domain name. They are relatively cheap, .Coms are usually under $10, and you will thank me if you decide to move to a new host later on.

Name.com is one of the best registars out there, and they give you free Whois protection. They are the only domain registar that I know of that does this. Other companies often charge more to protect your privacy than they do for the domain itself.

I also like that you are able to change the slug of sub-pages that you create on your site. For example: yoursite.devhub.com/your-custom-slug

This is useful for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and it makes your site more consistent. Should you decide to change hosts, it will be easier for you recreate the pages’ hierarchy or redirect your visitors to their new location.

When you start using DevHub, you will be able to create up to ten websites right away. In order to minimize spam, your account receives a quality score. You will receive a good quality score if you create quality content rather than spambait or junk websites. Once you reach a certain score, you will be able to create another set of 10 websites, and so on. The better quality your websites are, the more of them you will be able to create.

No matter what you want to do, DevHub has modules for most things out there. Monetization runs completely through DevHub (similar to HubPages), but, unlike Squidoo, you will have to apply to the various ad networks and affiliate programs yourself. However, there are certain monetization modules that you may use right out of the box. Simply place the desired modules, e.g. products or ads, on your site, and make money from your niche websites.

What’s more, all of this is absolutely free!

DevHub lives by taking a portion of the profit your website generates. That means, they benefit from you being successful and vice versa. To guarantee that, they offer payment-per-impression (PPM), payment-per-click (PPC), payment-per-action (PPA), and payment-per-lead (PPL) monetization modules for you to start using immediately.

Additionally, DevHub offers optional premium services. For example, you can hire their team of developers to design and implement custom solutions just for you.

DevHub is the right thing for you if…

• You want to make money online.
• You want to create niche-focussed content websites.
• You want free hosting and don’t care about the platform.
• You don’t mind sharing your profits with DevHub.
• You don’t want to be overwhelmed with managing your own website.

A final note, DevHub is not a permanent solution for your hosting needs. However, it will get your feet wet and give you the tools you need to begin learning how ecommerce works. If you want complete control over the look and feel of your website, or you want to keep 100% of the revenue it generates a full hosting company like HostGator is what you are looking for. HostGator also offers free, easy to use site building tools, plus access to 4500 professionally designed templates.