FAQs
If you’re an existing user please click here for information about your hosting, or contact us with any questions or inquiries.
Q: Who qualifies for free hosting?
A: Individuals, musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, small businesses, religious groups and non-profit organizations. We think a lot of website hosting services are too slow, too expensive, are overly confusing, and have terrible customer support. We want to help out the people that need it. If you can afford to donate money to us once, or every once in awhile, we’d really appreciate it. If not, we still think you’re great.
Q: How are you able to give away free hosting?
A: We lease a dedicated server which we self-manage to keep costs low. We have a few customers who pay us for the right to resell hosting on our server, and we receive a 20% commission from Godaddy on domains. We also have Premium accounts which give our customers additional hosting resources in exchange for a low monthly fee. We also accept donations via Paypal, Kiva.org gift certificates, drinks, words of praise, trading of services, and couches to sleep on.
Q: Will you insert ads onto my site?
A: No. Never. See above.
Q: Do you do website design?
A: No, we’re not very good at it. It seems like everyone’s a webdesigner these days, so you should be able to find one or learn yourself. Our control panel software also has an interface that allows you to design your own pages without knowing any code.
Q: If the hosting is free, why do you charge for domain name registration?
A: We wish it weren’t the case, but domain name registrations inheritantly cost money. ICANN (the International Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers), which everyone must go through to sell domains directly, charges a fixed fee of $4,000 plus a variable fee to sell domains. So what we do is resell domains from our dedicated hosting provider, The Planet (or Godaddy if we can get a better deal). The Planet charges us $9.43/year for each .com and $9.37 for each .net we buy from them. We charge our customers $10.00/year for .com or .net registrations or renewals. After credit card processing fees, we don’t make a profit off of domain registration. We sell domains to help make things easier for our users. If you already own a domain, the service won’t cost you a penny.
Q: What if I want to buy the domain myself? And do you sell other domains like .org’s, .me, .us, .eu, etc.?
A: Unfortunately, Unshadowed can only register .com’s and .net’s at this time. If you want to buy your domain on your own we recommend Godaddy. We kind of hate them because of their obnoxious ads and elaborate check-out process, but they’re pretty cheap, and now they offer us a 20% referral commission for domain registrations. As of the time of this writing, their regular pricing is $12.17/year for new .com’s, and more or less for other domains. Periodically, we’re able to snag some discount codes from them. We think the ad below is a pretty decent deal, so feel free to use our link below and grab a discount (and money for us).
Domain Sale! $7.49 .com at GoDaddy 
Q: How can I tell if the domain I want is available?
A: Try Godaddy or DomainTools.
Q: What if I want to transfer my domain that I registered with you, away from Unshadowed? Will you try to keep it or charge me something?
A: Nope. We want to keep you happy, but in the extremely rare case that you’re not satisfied with us, we’ll let you transfer your domain away from us with no strings attached. Or we’ll even change your nameservers (DNS) to your new host for you. Not a lot of hosts will do that for you.
Q: How can I sign up?
A: Sign up information is located here. The system is new, so if you have any questions or run into any issues, please contact us.
Q: What features are included with your free service?
A: Your resources are 100 MB of space and 1,000 MB of monthly bandwidth usage. You also get unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email forwarders, unlimited mySQL databases, unlimited subdomains and cPanel control panel software to manage it all. We also have software that allows you to do one-click installs of scripts like WordPress (which we used for this site), phpBB, image gallery scripts, and a whole lot more.
Q: What comes with your Premium service?
A: For $5/month (or $50/year) you get everything included above with our free service, plus 10,000 MB of space, 100,000 MB of monthly bandwidth usage, unlimited parked domains, unlimited addon domains, shell access (upon request) and some additional cPanel features. We’re also very liberal about giving out free bandwidth and/or diskspace upgrades to these users and performing other special requests. You also get the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping out Unshadowed and the hundreds of individuals and organizations that use our services.
Q: So if I’m a free user and I run out of resources, what happens? Do you I have to upgrade to the Premium service?
A: No. Just contact us about the problem and we’ll upgrade you for free. We just want to make sure our Premium users, who largely fund the entire service, get lots of resources by default. We want to make sure things run smoothly for you, so just let us know if you need anything, regardless of whether you can afford to donate to us or not.
Q: So wait, you’ll just upgrade people for free, even if they never pay you anything? Doesn’t that open up the service to abuse?
A: Does it open up potential for abuse? Probably. But that’s now how we see it. People pay for our premium service or donate to us because they know we’re an excellent host and want to support our cause. We think we’re better than the majority of the paid hosts out there, and a lot of our users agree, so if they’re are able to afford it, they’re willing to help us and the rest of the Unshadowed community.
Q: If I already have a website, is it easy to move it over to Unshadowed?
A: Yes. All you have to do is upload your files to us, which you can do via FTP or our control panel’s file manager software. If you own your own domain already, you just change your nameservers (DNS) at your registrar (the place where you bought your domain) to ns1.unshadowed.net and ns2.unshadowed.net. Then you’re all set.
If you have mySQL databases, you just export them to your computer and then import them via your control panel. If you have cPanel-based hosting already, it’s even easier–just do a full backup of your site using cPanel, download it to your computer, and then restore it using cPanel on our server. Lastly, change your nameservers like we described above. If any of this sounds confusing, don’t worry, we’re always happy to help.
Q: What’s your server running?
A: Our dedicated server is a dual-core 1.86 ghz Xeon with 2 x 250GB SATA hard drives, 4 GB of RAM, and 1,500 gigabytes of monthly bandwidth usage available. We run the latest versions of cPanel, Apache, mySQL, PHP and more. Our provider, The Planet, claims to have one of the largest and most sophisticated hosting facilities in the world. Their redundant network has more than 250 Gbps of transit and peering capacity.
Q: Do you allow reselling of your services?
A: Yes. If you’re a website designer or someone else who can benefit from reselling our services with your own service, please contact us so we can set something up. However, one thing we do NOT allow, is for someone to signup for our free accounts and sell them at a profit. You can setup free accounts for other people that need it, but you aren’t allowed to resell those free accounts.
Please see our about us section or contact us if you have any other questions.