Launching a website is
crucial step that will transfer your site from residing on one computer to being spread across web to appear upon thousands of monitors throughout globe. However, many
shrink from very thought of web hosting, looking upon it as an expensive, time-consuming process.
Although this is true with many web hosting providers, you can obtain ad-free, high-quality web hosting...
at absolutely no cost to you.
In process of writing article, I launched over twenty websites with various free web hosting
providers. I discovered that there are literally hundreds of companies that provide free web hosting. To
my disappointment, most have poor service.
Nearly every provider placed annoying advertisements on each of my pages, promoting cigarettes and other
products that my visitors would think that I endorse. Even when advertisements were for decent
products, their flashy animations detracted greatly from content of my site. (Hint: With Internet
Explorer, if you visit a site with distracting animations, press "escape" key. This will usually stop
them.)
Another disadvantage of most free web hosting services is that providers often sell their clients'
email addresses to SPAM companies. Ever since I began registering for free web hosting, amount of SPAM
I receive has tremendously increased. One hosting company offered to sell me a Master's Degree - for a
"low fee" I could get a M.A. in only five days - no studying, classes, or even a highschool diploma is
required. Another email "invited" me to a birthday party for CEO's son, with party favors including a
free 30-day trial for their web hosting service.
Utilize Your Resources
If you use either AOL or AT&T for your Internet service, you have free access to high-quality, ad-free web
space. You don't have to pay an extra fee or go through hassle of registering for free web space
because it's already included in your service plan.
For AOL users, enter AOL keyword: FTP. AOL provides five megabytes per username, totaling 25 megabytes.
Your web address will be http://members.aol.com/AOLusername.
For AT&T users, visit http://home.att.net AT&T gives you two addresses
at which your site can be reached: http://home.att.net/~yoursite and http://yoursite.home.att.net.
The Competition...
I ranked 20+ free web hosting companies from tremendous to terrible. Using a point-based system, I added a
point to their score for every positive service they provided, and each negative service they provided
(such as displaying ads on your site) deducted a point from their score. (Maximum possible points a
company could earn was 20 points) After all this was done, two companies stood at top of this list -
whose peerless scores far surpassed scores of any other company! Earning 18 and 14 points
respectively, these two companies far surpassed even major companies like YAHOO! (earning 4 pts), Lycos (6
pts), and even Microsoft (5 pts)!
#1: FreeWebs
FreeWebs resulted with highest score, claiming prize for ultimate web host. With 100 megabytes
of ad-free space, FreeWebs surpasses many paid services! FreeWebs also provides following free
services:
- Website builder (If you haven't already created your own website) - Hit counter - Chat rooms - Forums - Guest books - And much, much more!
Please note that FreeWebs gives you code to cut-and-paste into your website. If you don't know HTML,
simply copy code to your Clipboard, then open up your webpage with Selida (We discussed this in
