Just wanted to run a little update by you. As you know I stuck my money where my mouth is, started a youhosting host, bought one and tried to understand the shit that goes on over at youhosting.
Before I start though, it's worth pointing out the hostinger the owners of youhosting have been caught doing very unsavoury things overt at VPS.me - they offer a free VPS with next to no specs, the catch is they are selling all your details to data collectors. Really pro huh.
Anyway back to youhosting.
So you hear all sorts of claims, 2freehosting.com for example says they have 50,000 customers, I can now believe that, so when I said before I did not believe it I will stand corrected. You can indeed manage to round up 50,000 scammers, abusers, multi account users and bots. With such ease too!
But here is the thing, I will break it down visually:
Total Clients: 50,000
Inactive,suspended: 45,000
Dodgy content: 2,500
Paying accounts: 10-20
Now that might seem like an exageration? You think? Well I went to the youhosting forums and sent emails to those bigger ones and they gave me numbers for their service, and they match what I am saying above.
You see here is the issue. Youhosting want you to accept anyone and everyone then remove the trash, it suits them. Of course you can take a slightly higher moral ground if you choose, there are options in the control panel that allow you to prevent signups from any country you want. Now I suspect it does this simply by IP tracking which is useless really because it ignores all the traditional ways of bypassing this such as VPN, proxy, etc.. I checked so I you can.
But ultimately the issue is with their sign up form, no catchpa, security, nothing. You can even sign up for multiple accounts. But the great thing and my hat off to them is with Chinese, they have bots that can signup, install scripts and upload their "whatever". All the bigger youhosting providers like 2freehosting (sorry just using you as an example) offer sub domains, so this makes life even easier for all the trash to plague your systems with rotten content.
Now you see why it's easy to get 10k, 25k or 50k "clients" but in actual fact they are not really clients, well not most of them anyway. Now my caveat of course is that there are some who try to run a tight ship and keep to only accepting as good a client as they can in the hope of converting but like it or not it's a cesspit, full of abuse, many IP's blacklisted with hundreds of residential ISP's around the world and the only people making money are youhosting.com
Now before the fanboys come running, you know it's true and whilst you may be able to lay claim to successes it does not change the fact no sensible person who cares about their site should go near a youhosting server. If you don't care then fire on in there and get an account.
So, I feel my attacks are now justified because I have bled for my cause! It cost me a $150 total but I am not bitter, quite the opposite. I feel rewarded. :P