Free Web Hosting Abuse

Common Free Shared Hosting Abuse
Free web hosting companies have to deal with many types of online abuse. In this article I will discuss the most common ones. The first one I will talk about is hacking. At a free server, many websites are clustered together. A easy target for hackers, when the hosting server is not carefully configured. I happens all the time, a hacker opens an account at a free hosting site. He uploads his malicious PHP script (often the c99 web shell) and he can access other members sites, retrieving configuration files and thus password.
Another problem is phishing. A free web hosting is ideal for anonymity, since you don’t need to enter payment details, like name and credit-card nr. A hacker setup a sites which looks like a bank site or paypal. He then sends out thousands of spam mails containing a link to the fake website to try and lure users to enter banking details into his fake site. A free hosting company with sendmail() enabled can also be used to send out spam mails, but this doesn’t happen often. This is because the number of outgoing mails per account is limited.
A free web hosting site is also used to access blocked sites. A member uploads his free copy of the PHP-proxy script. A proxy script request the page instead of your pc, then sending it to you. This allows you to bypass firewalls, since you only connect to the proxy. However, this can also be used to be anonymous, since the IP-address of the server will appear in the logs, while it is the proxy requesting the resource. It is also a huge load on the servers resources, because it costs a lot of bandwidth.
This were the most common form of abuse. If you need a reliable host which deals with most of these abuse and has excellent support, please consider 000Webhost.