Free Web Hosts

If you're like me, and don't have an intensely specific website, a huge and often-visited site, or a lot of money to spend on your site, then you'll be looking for a free host. Of course, the disadvantage with a free host is that, if you are a business, you will not be taken seriously, and it can affect your search engine listing. It all depends on what your site is, though, and (in my opinion at least) some of the best sites on the web are on free hosts. Because we're on free hosts, we have no costs to cover for our websites, so we don't have to be constantly trying to persuade our visitors to buy stuff! Anyway, if you want a free webhost, here is my opinion on the leaders in the field.

I've had websites on these hosts before, hence I'm writing about them, there are more free hosts than these out there, though, and you can see a list of them here at Yahoo!'s listing.

These are my opinions, in descending order, from best to worst I've tried.

Freewebs/Freewebz

http://www.freewebs.com Freewebz.com redirects to the same site.

THE BEST!

Advantages

No advertising!!! No banners, no popups, nothing! The only thing you have to do in the way of ads for their sites, is to stick a little piece of code on each page which produces a text link saying "this site hosted by Freewebs" with a link to their site! Amazing, absolutely amazing! If you want to get rid of that, its only $1.60 per month or $10 per year!

You get 40mgs of space, and you can email them for up to 100mgs of space, if you need it and can persuade them to give you it! Or you can give them $10 a year and get 200mgs space. But you shouldn't need it.

Easy editing. They give you a web-based control panel where you can edit your HTML, press "preview" and be shown what it looks like.

Short user name - http://www.freewebs.com/yourname

They have a site-builder which looks good, but I've never used it.

They are the cheapest people I've ever seen for premium services, domain hosting, and all that. Were I to buy a domain name and want it hosted, I would get it from them. (Its $12 per year for domain hosting, or about $9 a month for all of their premium services including domain hosting).

You can have more than one account.

Disadvantages

Their editing service only works if you have up-to-date Internet Explorer, and doesn't work in Netscape. You need to have a fairly decent computer too - the reason I'm not hosted by them is that my computer can't cope with their fancy things, and tends to crash often.

You can only upload one file at a time. This is a biggish disadvantage, as it can take ages to upload things one at a time, and if you have a piddly little computer like mine, it can take even longer.

My opinion: brilliant. This is the best free webhost I've ever seen. Unfortunately, those two disadvantages above prevent me from using them - my computer just can't cope. Otherwise I would certainly use them. I'd hurry though, lots of people will sign up for a host with no advertising!

Brinkster

http://www.brinkster.com

As well as offering many paid packages, Brinkster offer a free website.

Advantages

No ads. As far as I've seen, there are no ads to be found, no popups or banners or anything, not even a linkback required for sites on Brinkster.

Decent amount of space and easy to edit. You get a web-based editor where you can edit online, press "preview" after saving and it pops up your website as it looks to your visitors. You can upload five files at a time.

You can use fancy things like databases on your page. I don't know how to use them, so I never have, but its quite unusual to be able to use fancy stuff like that on your free site.

Short username - http://www*.brinkster.com/yourname. * They put a number here, eg www15.brinkster.com/yourname.

Disadvantages

You can only have one account per email address and you can't put any advertising for another company on your website.

When using their online editor, it times out after a very short period of time so its best to edit in notepad then cut and paste to the online file.

My opinion: excellent. The reason I'm not hosted by them is that they were down when I was creating this site. I gave my email address to them, but never got the confirmation code needed to create my site. Now that this site is up and running, I'll probably stick with this to save hassle. It is, however, an excellent hosting service.

Yahoo! Geocities

http://www.oocities.org

I built my first ever website on Geocities, in 1997, before Geocities was taken over by Yahoo!. I'm still with them today, after having successfully survived the merger (though not with my old website intact, everything went peculiar, but it wasn't very good anyway). There are reasons why I like and dislike Geocities, advantages and disadvantages you should consider before signing up.

Advantages

Short URL, http://www.oocities.org/yourname.

Very easy to use. If you are using the "Advanced HTML Editor", then you just type your code into a screen, press "save", and your website is there! Easy, loads quickly, and you can view your page from within the editing screen, allowing you to fix any errors in your typing. It even shows the images you've linked to - it didn't at one time - which is very handy.

Lets you upload as many files as you like. Some sites only allow you to upload a small number of files (usually one at a time) in order to induce you to buy the ability to upload lots at once. This is particularly handy if you need to upload a load of files at the start, or if you have created your pages in an editor and want to upload them all at once.

Doesn't use popups. The advertising is (as you can see) a strip running down the side of your page which closes itself after a period of time. I have occassionally received a popup on viewing Geocities' pages, but not often.

Has an internal links directory. You can submit your site to the Geocities' members directory under the appropriate category and are guaranteed a listing. Very handy, and the results sometimes come up on normal searches.

You get 15megabytes of space, which is plenty. I've never even come close to filling up that limit

They provide add-ons for your pages, guestbooks, counters and the like.

Disadvantages

Their page wizard and layouts are very obvious. I remember the old Geocities, which had an extremely simple wizard, but (as I recall) managed to teach you the basics of HTML while it did so, and had a decent number of images. If you use their wizard everyone can tell you did. If you do get a Geocities account, learn HTML, its not hard, and you get a better looking website.

Their addons often do not work. Its only rarely I've ever been able to sign a Geocities guestbook, and they don't have a lot of space for entries. I've never used their guestbook - my advice is to use GuestGEAR from Lycos.

Their advertising can be irritating. When you sign up, it says the advertising changes depending on what category you choose - it doesn't. If you get a religious website, for example, you will still be getting pictures of half naked women coming up on your screen. If you use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to change the colours of your links and things, then it can do really odd things to the advertising - check out the Queer & Christian website to see.

It can be really difficult to get the name you want. Because Yahoo! has so many different things for members, your name can be taken. Plus, if you create a profile (eg aerondreams) and then a subprofile (eg aeronmccarthy) for use on chatrooms or groups, or as your email address, then no one else, including you, can ever use that subprofile name as their website address. So, if the name you want is a common one (and many, many are) then you might end up with an enormous name including underscores and all sorts of things, which is then difficult for your visitors to type in or remember. This, to my mind, is the biggest difficulty with Geocities.

My opinion: good. Overall, Geocities is a good host (which is why I'm still with them). They let you do what you want to with your site, and their advertising isn't bad, as these things go. If you are fortunate enough to have an uncommon name for your website, it can be great, but if you want a common name, you can wind up with a really long and hard to remember URL.

Tripod & Angelfire

http://www.tripod.com & http://www.angelfire.com

Both of these sites are owned by Lycos, who also own the HTMLGear sites -Guestgear, Feedbackgear, that sort of thing.

Advantages

With Tripod, you get an easy to remember name http://yourname.tripod.com.

You get a decent amount of space and the use of the HTMLgear facilities without having to get another username. You may be listed as a featured site.

With Angelfire, you have the option of displaying an advertising banner on the top of your page rather than a popup. You can personalise that banner with a surrounding graphic and a graphic next to the ad which you design yourself.

Its easy to edit your site - you use a web-based control panel and can edit the HTML right then and there, and preview the site. You can upload as much as you like.

The Web control panel also gives links to places to get backgrounds & animations, as well as the code library.

Disadvantages

Tripod uses the most irritating popups on every single page that is offered. You get two popups shown on the first page, and one on every page thereafter. Angelfire (even if you choose the banner ad option) displays a popup on the first page. Visitors hate popups, personally I avoid Tripod pages because I will accept one popup, but not two, from any free site I visit. Really, really irritating, enough to put me off entirely.

With Angelfire, you get a very long URL. http://www.angelfire.com/category/yourusername - the categories are such things as "darkside", "on4", and other similar ones.

Because both Tripod and Angelfire are part of the Lycos network, you may have difficulty in getting your user name - if someone has signed up to get HTMLgear under the name you want, no one can then get a website with that username.

You cannot use bordered backgrounds on Angelfire. If you want to use a border, and have links down one side, and use a table to structure that, then it pushes the ad banner way off to one side, making the page really wide.

My opinion: mediocre. Still, they're free. I could forgive them the rest, if it wasn't for those popups.

Freeservers

http://www.freeservers.com

I used to host on Freeservers, I'm not entirely sure whether they have removed the free bit of it now or not, but I'll review it anyway, as it was when I was there.

Advantages

Great URLs. You can get http://www.yourname.8m.com, or http://www.yourname.faithweb.com among others.

Large amount of space, dead easy to edit. You get a popup screen containing a list of your files, with pull down menus like you get in Windows to create, delete, or edit those files.

They used to provide several possible email addresses yourname@yoursitename.8m.com for example, which you could either forward to another address, or log into and read messages from your site. This made your site look quite professional, but I think its a service they got rid of.

Links to places to get counters, other website addons, and to make money from your site from the members area.

You can get more than one website, and can get their members bit to remember which websites you have, and provide a pull-down list for when you log in.

Disadvantages

Popups, tons of them. About two on every single page of your site, usually advertising gambling, in addition to a banner on the top of every page.

Amazingly, that was the only disadvantage I remember! But it was an enormous disadvantage, loads of popups everywhere, big ones that were difficult to make go away. My opinion: poor. I am not sure whether they are offering the same things as they did before, as the amount of advertising forced upon me caused me to leave them.

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