Is free web hosting really free?

[Casanova]

I heard that free web hosting will provide you the space, but you will also have the advertisement such as banners or google adsense on your web. Is it true? Is there any free web hosting that will not do this?

[Andy]

Since all hosting has to be paid for in some way, you can expect some ads to appear at some stage, the site to be taken over or charges applied to update your content at some stage.

Some offers will be completely clear of ads to start with so they attract customers, but people I know that used free hosting were always needing to switch hosts and their sites never really got a chance to get much traffic. Also, they have more rules to obey than paid hosting.

You can install a server on your home computer but it has to be always on which is a nuisance and your upload speed tends to be very slow which translates into slow loading of your site for visitors. Plus the ip address may change and it may be against the terms of your isp agreement 

[Menard]

There are some very good choices out there for free hosting. All of my sites are hosted on free accounts, with some variences on what they provide.

The rub with free hosting is that you are not going to get everything you would get with a paid hosting service. There are free hosts which will provide advanced features like database management, SSI, etc, but no free host will give you everything.

They provide the free hosting for several reasons:

1) The number of free subcribers who will convert to paid subcribers is apparently good enough to support the free hosting.

2) A good number of free subscribers will opt for a sub-domain rather than a domain which adds to the favorability of the provider's own service (if someone wanted to post content to your domain for free, wouldn't you let them; I would).

3) Of course, with the ones which use banners or adsense on freely hosted sites, they have the advantage of extending their revenue through the use of someone else's efforts.


I'm certain there are probably a few more reasons, but that was all I could think of at the moment.


What are some good free hosts?

50Webs stands out above the rest due to reliability and being ad free. They offer 60 MB of space with no restictions on bandwidth, but they do have a maximum file size of 300 KB. They do not support php or cgi on free accounts. The sign-up is a little confusing; you need to sign-up for a sub-domain, not a domain, then add your domain to your account after you have signed up. I host the majority of my domains with them.

free-space (I am not kidding; that is all they call themselves) - They offer 255 MB of free space with no bandwidth restrictions. They offer only sub-domain hosting, but they are the best provider of free space (non-domain) with which you can host an adult site. They allow any type of site (it does not have to be adult) and place no ads on the pages. You can have multiple accounts with them. I have several sites hosted with them. They are the only free service I have found so far that will allow you to host multimedia files, zip files, etc.; up to 100 MB per file (which is precisely why I use them rather than hosting my files with an off site service which will delete them for lack of activity). The downsides are that, for US subcribers, the servers are located in Germany, so pages can be a little slow to load for US surfers. They also are picky about which email address you use to sign-up; it is best to use a Yahoo or MyWay account so you can actually receive the confimation email (I don't know about others, but they don't seem to like fastermail, cooltoad, or zzn accounts). Even though they place no ads on hosted sites, they do kindly treat you to popups when you are using your file manager. When clicking on the link to their service, you will additionally get a popup which is their free photo hosting service.

Weezy'Host offers 150 MB of space, unlimited transfer, php and SSI support for free accounts. I do not use them, but am considering it as they do look interesting.

ATSPACE.COM (by agreement, I always italicize their name ) offers 50 MB of space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, sub-domain hosting, and no ads. They do not offer php or cgi support and limit file size to 200 KB. They are probably the easiest host with which to sign-up for an account, offer an easy to use account manager, and have no restrictions on what kind of email service you have. They have a sister service, AWARDSPACE (again, by agreement) which offers 200 MB of free space with 5 GB of bandwidth. They provide php support (cgi and perl are listed, provided they have worked out the bugs). They will host 2 domains and 5 sub-domains for free. The rub with both services is that they use keyword filtering for security reasons. This means that you cannot link to, or even have text containing, paypal, ebay, aol, or amazon; if you do, you will get a 500 internal error causing your pages not to load and redirect to their page.

Cool Toad (used to be Cool Goose) offers free hosting which will be a directory (cooltoad/sites/yourusername). They only accept html, jpg, and gif files. The hosting service comes free when you sign up for their free email service, whether you want to use the space or not. I have no idea how much space is provided (they don't say) but the email account is 100 MB. The only reason I list them is that ,despite offering such a basic service, their servers are very reliable.


There are others out there. Like Andy said, one of the problems with free hosting is whether or not the service is going to be there for you tomorrow (of course, the same could be said for paid hosting as well). Although sub-domains are free, it is best to get a domain and have it hosted for free. If you are not satisfied with your hosting service, or they go down, you will still have the same url; you just have to move your files to a new host.

[Andy]

Thanks for the informative post Menard.

It's always great to get feedback from people with direct experience. My experience of free hosts is well out of date now since I find the latest offers of paid hosting very appealing.

I am also officially diagnosed as a control freak (by some corporate training lady). It kind of shocked me at the time since all I did was chat her up before the training. But I guess most people don't do that and would rather feel awkward waiting for the proceedings to start. Oops giving too much away here...

What I was going to say is that I like all the bells and whistles you get with a cool control panel with paid hosting. I guess that is why I can't seem to use free hosting even if it was better! I even went for re-seller hosting even though it costs 2x for the control and power it brings 

[Menard]

I am eventually going to have to go for paid hosting when I get my new personal site ready to upload (it's a long way off still) as I am going to need the space, the bandwidth, and no restrictions on my content. The free hosts have come in handy for experimenting with designs and for turnkey hosting. I have a lot more links for free hosts in my file, but I figured it was best to just list the top providers for each of their respective offers (I am such a geek that spend a good amount of time searching for free stuff, testing it, then posting links to it; which reminds me, I found a great, free image editor and need to post a link to it in another thread).

I also have a tendency to spread out the hosting for my sites, rather than have them all hosted by the same service; just to keep all of my sites from going down at the same time in case of an outage.

[Andy]

I can provide you free hosting for a while for your personal site if you like on my shared reseller hosting. Any legal site is ok. Then we can maybe work out some idea for a new kind of hosting service?

[Menard]

I can provide you free hosting for a while for your personal site if you like on my shared reseller hosting. Any legal site is ok. Then we can maybe work out some idea for a new kind of hosting service?

That would be cool!

It is several months off as there is a lot of work to be done on it; I have been occupying a lot of my time recently with promoting a website I have designed for a friend's business and working on some new turnkey sites (boy, if I was organized, I might actually be scary ).

[Andy]

Let me know when you are ready buddy! I always enjoy working with action-takers.

Working on other people's sites really eats into your time like you are finding. I just got close to the end of an 11 month stint on a ex-work-colleague's site. Nearly finished

[Menard]

This site is still in its early stages. I started building it in the Summer, then kind of let it sit until he started getting business off of it and he became more interested in the site at that point. Being that he is a wholesaler offering various products, the difficult task is still to come as I need to create an online catalog of his products (this could well be in the 100s of products) and integrate that into two different stores; one for wholesale and one for retail.

[etechsupport]

As far as poor service and support is concerned with most of the free hosting companies, I don't think free hosting is a good idea. Also think that way if google crawler visited your site and found your site in downtime what would be the impact of SE?. 

[Menard]

As far as poor service and support is concerned with most of the free hosting companies, I don't think free hosting is a good idea. Also think that way if google crawler visited your site and found your site in downtime what would be the impact of SE?. 

Quite frankly, there is not a great deal of difference in uptime and support between paid and free hosts. I'd rather not pay for lousy service than snub my nose at good service just because it is free. Yes, there are free hosts which suck, and there are paid hosts which suck; that is why there are several sites which rate hosting services, both paid and free, and it is a good idea to investigate either before you sign-up with them.

And yes, I have a site which was down for two months; this did not apparently affect it that severely as it was still ranked a PR4 by Google compared to a site which has never been down and is still ranked at a PR0. I covered a comparison of both sites in another thread.

[etechsupport]

Anyway, what I think if you pay you have command for better service & support. IMO As far hosting is concern, if it suck you can loss your valuable customers as it directly affect them. So far I have not talked about the junk advertisement on the site those hosted with free host providers though!

[Menard]

So far I have not talked about the junk advertisement on the site those hosted with free host providers though!

Could you kindly point out the junk advertising on my site? I must have missed it; thought it was all mine.

[etechsupport]

Could you kindly point out the junk advertising on my site? I must have missed it; thought it was all mine.

Mates,  I am not talking about your site, I am talking in general. However my views are subjective as it might not applicable to all free host providers.
Cheers!

[Menard]

Mates,  I am not talking about your site, I am talking in general. However my views are subjective as it might not applicable to all free host providers.
Cheers!

That was my point; you were generalizing. There are free hosting providers who won't place ads on sites, and there are free hosting providers that will place large ads and even popups on sites; most fall somewhere in-between. There are very good choices for free hosting available for someone who does their homework and doesn't jump at the first host they find; like geocities .

Of course, free hosting is only an option if they provide what you need, or if you are willing to accept what you get. The natural rub with free hosts is that they are not going to provide everything that paid hosting provides. Why should they, as that is how they are able to operate; but offering the free hosting provides several benefits to them as well.

Free hosting has come a long way as even more free hosts are offering php hosting for free. The one thing, though, which free host generally don't offer is unrestricted hosting of any file type. The majority will not allow archive, multimedia, and document files (I am including doc, pdf, etc. in that). There are options to host those files off site and link to it, and free options at that, but it would be much more convenient to have it hosted in the same directory. There are presently only two free hosting providers I can verify that will allow hosting of any file type and do not place size restrictions on the files (okay, one has a 100MB limit on a single file).

Being that I presently have in excess of 30 sites, it would be quite expensive for me to have them all on paid hosting, especially since I don't need the added features of paid hosting for the majority of them. Yes, I know I could have them all hosted with the same provider, but I am too paranoid about downtime to do that (the first few sites I ever built were all hosted by the same provider, and, due to hacks against the servers, they were down for 4 days, leaving all of my sites down as well; I have since never hosted more than a few sites with the same hosting service).

There are very good, and many free hosting options. For those not looking, or needing, to economize, there are even better paid hosting options.

One of my interests on the web has always been to find free stuff; and the internet is littered with it. Some of it is just as good as something for which you would pay, some of it belongs in the trash. I have had to reformat more than one hard drive after testing software which was supposedly free, and I don't regret it as I was able to inform others about it. I have tried free hosting which made promises and broke them in less than a week, while other free hosting providers gave more than what they promised. I have found multiple resources for free promtion across the web which I have used (exclusively, as I never pay to have my sites promoted). I found all of this by using a simple device called a search engine which anybody can use. There is all kinds of information on the net which can be put to good use, provided someone has the diligence to look for it.

I have shared what I found, and tested, with other by either posting it in forums or on my sites (my free promotion resources were not well received, and, quite frankly, badmouthed). Someone can bother to do all this testing on their own, and sacrifice a hard drive or two if they wish, or they can learn from someone who has already bothered to do that and is willing to freely share their findings; and the internet is filled with people like that.

There is an old, and very outdated cliche which many quote: 'You can't get something for nothing'. The new cliche for the internet is: 'You can't get something for nothing, if you don't bother to look or ask'.