*Poof*

zogger

Wed Jan 24 23:58:04 -0800 2007

manage

That's what happened to me before. Go to your site-it ain't there!  Lost several forum boards like that. I even lost an ISP site once, on a mom and pop ISP I was one of their first customers at, joe loyal and everything, they got bought out by earthlink, poof, no access to site even though I was all paid up, they didn't even leave a remnant of their original ISP portal page with a redirect or anything..just...gone.
 No amount of old fashioned telephone calls or emails would fix it either, and that had, among other things, an amazon page I had worked a long time on on doing reviews and whatnot...grumble. Free sites..all I can say is have complete full backups on your own box, and mirror the same content at different free sites in advance if that is what you want to do on the inexpensive, then if one poofs, no matter, change your DNS redirect to the next one that is already up.

Many eggs, many baskets.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. In general you get what you paid for..

the_rajah

Thu Jan 25 10:09:50 -0800 2007

manage

I run a small hosting service myself. I can't compete with the massive bulk hosting companies on the basis of space and bandwidth for unbelievable low prices per month. I can, however compete on the basis of service. I know most of our customers on a first name basis and they know that when they call us, they'll get a live person who speaks English as a first language and who can usually fix a problem in a matter of minutes.

In the distant past, before I had a server, I've used freebie hosting, but it's always been ad based or ISP provided. I never, ever counted on it being there from one minute to the next, but I was surprised to find recently that a tripod page I did ages ago was still there and running.

You might take a look at Googlepages.com and see if that could fill your needs. I've done a couple of very small sites there to see how it works. The URL there is something like "yourname.googlepages.com" You could always do the FreeDNS frames thing pointing to the googlepages site.

Zogger's advice about always, always having your sites, freebie or not, mirrored and backed up locally is a must.

low cost lunch

rubycodez

Thu Jan 25 14:55:44 -0800 2007

manage

there are places that charge less than $4 / month, and have prefab tools to do common tasks and make blog, forum, wiki, take a credit card order with shopping cart, prefab or your own php or perl cgi, etc.  I've used webhostingbuzz for this a few times, fast and easy and no complaints if you can live without a login shell.  Of course, this is with no static IP, just url forwarding, static IP is $30 / year but then google seems to give those types of websites higher priority while yahoo and some other don't seem to care.  Funny thing is they do allow cron jobs, you can do pretty close to what shell access can do if you're slick 8D

low cost lunch

Kai Howells

Thu Jan 25 15:29:45 -0800 2007

manage

Well, I'm just gonna have to jump in and give it a go myself... I'm pretty sure that amongst the Google search results, there are some that claim no ads/banners/popups and a (shared) static IP.
I'm definitely going to heed Zogger's advice - the site will definitely not host my only copy of any files, all dev work (what little there is at the moment, it's all static html and images) will be done on my Mac and only copies of the finished pages will be uploaded...

I suppose one thing I was worried about was somehow loosing my domain name, from some of the terms and conditions the free hosts have, it sounds like you transfer your domain to them for the period of your free hosting... I'll definitely be reading the fine print very closely and will post my results some time in the not too distant future...

Alternatively, I might just bite the bullet and sign up with Dreamhost and resell some of the excess webspace and bandwidth to my mates =)

Ask Technocrat: Free Web Hosting Plans, or "Is there any such thing as a free lunch?"

mcrbids

Fri Jan 26 01:05:05 -0800 2007

manage

It's amazing to me just how cheap actual physical hardware hosting is, nowadays. I'm hosting a half-rack in one of the finest hosting facilities around (365 Main, in San Fransisco, CA) and chewing up an average of  around 10 Mb of traffic for just $600/month.

I don't know what your concern is, but it's easy to scale UP for very reasonable cost.

Google Apps for Your Domain

GeorgeB

Fri Jan 26 07:42:33 -0800 2007

manage

For the moment I use EveryDNS for dns hosting and Google Apps for Your Domain for mail hosting. With a free account I can create up to 25 e-mail accounts (and mailing lists) with 2GB of storage for each account. The account can also be used on Google Talk and Calendar (you can share the calendar between accounts on that domain). They also have free hosting for the web pages (100MB I think) but I haven't used it yet (I parked it on opensourceparking.com ;-) ). You can check their page for details on web hosting.
I think that is one of the best service around considering that google is managing this, I don't expect availability problems or loss of data; and the e-mail interface is great (same as gmail).

Google Apps for Your Domain

GeorgeB

Fri Jan 26 07:44:38 -0800 2007

manage

Sorry for multiple posts; I got an error, so I refreshed, after the second failed refresh I thought about checking the site to see if the comment was posted. The error:

Application error (Apache)

Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html

Google Apps for Your Domain

GeorgeB

Fri Jan 26 07:42:39 -0800 2007

manage

For the moment I use EveryDNS for dns hosting and Google Apps for Your Domain for mail hosting. With a free account I can create up to 25 e-mail accounts (and mailing lists) with 2GB of storage for each account. The account can also be used on Google Talk and Calendar (you can share the calendar between accounts on that domain). They also have free hosting for the web pages (100MB I think) but I haven't used it yet (I parked it on opensourceparking.com ;-) ). You can check their page for details on web hosting.
I think that is one of the best service around considering that google is managing this, I don't expect availability problems or loss of data; and the e-mail interface is great (same as gmail).

Google Apps for Your Domain

GeorgeB

Fri Jan 26 07:42:42 -0800 2007

manage

For the moment I use EveryDNS for dns hosting and Google Apps for Your Domain for mail hosting. With a free account I can create up to 25 e-mail accounts (and mailing lists) with 2GB of storage for each account. The account can also be used on Google Talk and Calendar (you can share the calendar between accounts on that domain). They also have free hosting for the web pages (100MB I think) but I haven't used it yet (I parked it on opensourceparking.com ;-) ). You can check their page for details on web hosting.
I think that is one of the best service around considering that google is managing this, I don't expect availability problems or loss of data; and the e-mail interface is great (same as gmail).

Ask Technocrat: Free Web Hosting Plans, or "Is there any such thing as a free lunch?"

WeblionX

Fri Jan 26 08:40:32 -0800 2007

manage

The cheapest one I've come across is Nearly Free Speech, but I haven't used them. I managed to score a host for $10 for the entire year that would normally cost $119 at NetFirms.

I've also seen one that is $1/month, but it had some problems with being able to take credit cards. I don't have the link to check anymore, but I'm sure it's still around. I could probably dig it up in a little bit, though. If I find it (And it's solved its problems) I'll reply.

Now, to specifically answer your question, the three free services I've tried are Geocities, Spymac, and Homestead. All of them are pretty terrible, and none of them allow PHP on the free accounts last I checked (A while ago.) My suggestion is find someone with a good host and ask for a virtual host on it. Perhaps offer to pay some part of the bill.

Ask Technocrat: Free Web Hosting Plans, or "Is there any such thing as a free lunch?"

George Bernard

Sun Apr 15 13:10:01 -0700 2007

manage

I'm having some pretty good luck with http://www.Spruz.com.  They have a free service, and they have a single banner add to support the free service.  I don't mind an add, especially after i saw the features they're offering for the free site.  They've got a great thing going, and it's looking better every day.