4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to home page of a particular domain, i.e. other things remaining same, a home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of free hosting services, your index.html page is home page of your site, but not of that domain. Hence in these search engines, your site will find it very difficult to make it to top 20 or top 30, let alone top 10 for some of really competitive keywords. Just think of amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens.

5) Some search engines are now refusing to spider web sites which are hosted by free web hosts. For instance, if you have a site hosted by free web hosts, you would, until recently, have got infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your site if you tried to submit your site to AltaVista. While AltaVista now says that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if you try to submit your site, rest assured that it will not spider any site belonging to many of free web hosts even though it says that your site has been accepted. Can you afford that?

6) When your site is hosted by some of free web hosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in a major directory like Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is being hosted in one of free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your site listed by Yahoo!!. Listing your site with Yahoo! is difficult enough even when you have your own domain. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.

If you do not currently have a domain name, are you convinced that you need one right now? The small fee that you pay per year for your own domain name is peanuts compared to benefits that you get. You can check out availability of domain names and register new domains at: http://the-easy-way.com/webhosting.html

Geeklog - http://www.geeklog.net/

Mambo - http://www.mamboserver.com/

MD-Pro - http://www.maxdev.com/

myPHPNuke - http://www.myphpnuke.com/

PHP-Nuke - http://www.phpnuke.org/

phpWebSite - http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/

Postnuke - http://www.postnuke.com/

Typo3 - http://typo3.com/

Xaraya - http://www.xaraya.com/

XOOPS - http://www.xoops.org/

CMS - Blogs

b2evolution - http://b2evolution.net/

bBlog - http://www.bblog.com/

BLOG:CMS - http://blogcms.com/

Nucleus CMS - http://nucleuscms.org/

pLog - http://www.plogworld.org/

pMachine Free - http://www.pmachine.com/

Serendipity - http://www.s9y.org/

Textpattern - http://www.textpattern.com/

WordPress - http://wordpress.org/

CMS - e-Commerce

MyMarket - http://mymarket.sourceforge.net/

osc2nuke - http://www.osc2nuke.org/

osCommerce - http://www.oscommerce.com/

Zen Cart - http://www.zen-cart.com/

CMS - Groupware

dotProject - http://www.dotproject.net/

eGroupWare - http://www.egroupware.org/

MoreGroupware - http://www.moregroupware.org/

phpCollab - http://www.php-collab.com/

PHProjekt - http://www.phprojekt.com/

CMS - Forums

openBB - http://www.openbb.com/

Phorum - http://phorum.org/

phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/

PunBB - http://www.punbb.org/

W-Agora - http://www.w-agora.net/

XMB - http://www.xmbforum.com/

CMS - e-Learning

ATutor - http://www.atutor.ca/

Claroline - http://www.claroline.net/

Moodle - http://moodle.org/

Segue - http://segue.middlebury.edu/index.php?&action=site&site=segue

Site@School - http://siteatschool.sourceforge.net/

CMS - Photo Albums

Coppermine - http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/

Gallery - http://gallery.sourceforge.net/

CMS - KnowledgeBase

Owl - http://owl.sourceforge.net/

CMS - Customer Support

SugarSales CRM - http://www.sugarcrm.com/

As you can see, there are many choices so thing to do next is a bit of research by taking a look through a few and finding one that suits your exact needs. There is really no wrong choice, it's all a matter of preferences and features that you are looking for.

Happy Open Sourcing!

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About The Author:

Open Source Free Software De-Mystified Copyright 2004 by Jared Alberghini - http://www.WebDesignHQ.com

You are free to re-distribute this article in it's entirety as long as copyright notice stays intact.

About The Author:

Open Source Free Software De-Mystified Copyright 2004 by Jared Alberghini - http://www.WebDesignHQ.com