Part I: Meeting Your Needs

Introduction

People on internet are greedy. They want some ultimate free host, with “unlimited” storage, “unlimited” bandwidth, and no ads. That will never happen, unless it is some private host that only allows a few users. I hate seeing this greed. Why should a host give you so much, and you don’t even let them make money? It’s a ridiculous idea. You have to make realistic goals on what your host might be able to provide you.

The point of article is to help you determine specific requirements for free host you want to pick.

Storage & Bandwidth

To determine how much storage and bandwidth you need for your website, you need to think about what kind of files you may be storing. The majority of people who don’t have anything but HTML and image files usually don’t need more than 5 Mb. If this is case, don’t rule out any host because it doesn’t have a huge amount of space. If your website stores several megabytes of files, your choices may be limited. There are plenty of websites that give you 20 Mb+, but most will ban file types such as .MP3.

Ad Types

I have heard a lot of people complain about how annoying ads are on their free websites. It’s rare these days to find a host without ads, and when there is one, it is usually abused and goes down months later. That happens for a reason, and that reason is that there is no money to be made when you have no ads. If people aren’t paying for website, ads are way company pays for their bills and salaries.

But don’t lose hope yet, there are options. If you are a business site, it might look unprofessional if you have a banner on top of your page. For this reason you might choose a host that looks like it will stay around for a while but has no ads, or get a host that has pop-ups. Pop-ups are quicker for user to click out of, and visitor only has to see it a second every time he enters a new page. The downside of pop-ups occur when visitors change pages quickly. If your visitors go to many pages each visit, a pop-up coming back up every time may be very annoying. In this situation, a banner may be better.

Those internet companies which provided free services and based their existence on supporting those services with advertising are having a tough time right now. The advertising model is based upon network television's success at providing free programming in exchange for viewing of advertisements.

The most significant issue with this model (on both television and internet) is fact that customer is not viewer or user. The customer is advertiser. The actual user of service is commodity which is being sold. That's why Neilson ratings are so important to network stations - they determine how many viewers are watching so that commercial time can be sold. The higher rating, more likely sales are to occur and higher rates can be.

The model gets even more convoluted with services such as GeoCities and Egroups. You see, model normally has three components: company selling advertising (such as Yahoo), advertisers (the real customers), and users (the viewers of ads). Egroups and GeoCities adds a forth grouping.

This is content providers. In network television, content is purchased directly by networks and carefully planned to be of maximum desirability to advertisers. In case of Yahoo and similar companies, content is created by a legion of volunteers, all more or less industriously working to make money for corporate machine.

Who are these content providers? Why, anyone who has a web site (in case of GeoCities) and runs a mailing list (in case of egroups). As you create web pages or send emails you are actually giving content to company, in which they place advertisements. People look at your content and view ads.

Unfortunately, in this model content providers are not worth much to company. After all, there are plenty more where they came from. Someone will always want a free web site or mailing list or whatever in exchange for showing of ads.

That is main reason why service from companies with this model tends to be exceptionally poor - content providers are lowest critters on food chain.