The actual question should be: how do they afford to give away free hosting? The answer is: the margins on shared hosting are extremely high because you can dump a ton of users on a single server. 2GB of storage and 20GB of bandwidth costs very little, and I'd assume they use the free accounts to intice people to pay for their premium plan once they exceed the limits (wouldn't be hard) HTH.
The actual question should be: how do they afford to give away free hosting? The answer is: the margins on shared hosting are extremely high because you can dump a ton of users on a single server. 2GB of storage and 20GB of bandwidth costs very little, and I'd assume they use the free accounts to intice people to pay for their premium plan once they exceed the limits (wouldn't be hard) HTH.
https://www.drupal.org/node/618912