Claire's Random Thoughts

Phew, it took me hours to move everything properly, but I finally moved my site to a reliable paid server. Since I had to reconfigure a couple things anyway, I switched to a better theme. Unfortunately, it will probably take at least a few more hours for my domain name servers to propagate, but hopefully that will be the end of my downtimes. Thank you, hostican! For those of you who are still using unreliable free hosting, I recommend hostican. I used them for my stempania site for a while, and have been very happy with them. The prices are some of the most reasonable I have found, and the service is top-notch. By the way, for those of you interested, use the coupon code 1dollar-3 to get three months of their base host for only $1.

Why is free hosting bad? My mommy has always taught me that nothing was free, but I still dreamed and ignored her until recently. Now I know that she was right. I, like many other victims, have spent too many hours looking for free web hosts. In fact, in the time that I spent looking for a free host, I probably could have worked and earned enough money to buy a year of quality hosting. So, what does this tell me? I simply wasted my time and still ended up spending the money necessary for paid hosting.

If you wish to use free hosting, then the free hosts that suck, such as freewebs, geocities, and angelfire are probably actually your better choices. Although they put ads on your pages and offer minimal storage and bandwidth, they’re big, have been around for a long time, and won’t all of a sudden go down or start charging you. Alternatively, the more experienced webmaster can go with 50webs or awardspace. 50webs and awardspace do not put ads on pages, but they have strict file size limits that greatly restrict your capabilities. The point is, the better a free service appears to be, the more likely it will be to not function properly, disappear, or start charging. The free hosting services that appear to not offer much may be better if they are well-known. Another indicator of a good free host is its tendency to offer a paid hosting upgrade. Usually, if a free host offers an optional paid upgrade, it’s legitimate and will always be there. Don’t be fooled by what some free hosts may claim to offer. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Here are some more examples of free hosting that sucked: 5000megs.com and 1001megs.com mysteriously disappeared literally overnight without any prior warning. I used both of them when I was first learning html and lost all my work. Good thing it wasn’t very good quality work anyway.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story:
I was looking for a free host with the following features: No ads on pages, option of using a top level domain, FTP access, mysql databases, a decent file size limit, at least 100 mb of storage, and at least 10 GB of monthly bandwidth. This was very difficult to find in a free service, but I was stupid enough to think there would be one, so I spent hours searching. I thought I found one when I found 110mb.com (don’t use their service, it’s horrible). I was pleased during the first few hours, because it appeared to work. Only one day later, the trouble began. My site was already down. The 110mb company claimed that some “bad apples” used their service to phish ebay, but now I think that they just had some problems and tried to make up an excuse. At the time, I believed them and decided to give their service a chance, because they offered all the features that I wanted. After over a week of 100% downtime, the sites were finally up again. I was satisfied for a mere few days before the next phase of major downtime. They claimed that all the sites were being moved to more reliable servers in Europe, so I was once again patient in hopes that the sites would be faster and stable in the near future. This occurred a week or two ago, and my site has still been down quite frequently. As if all the downtime and empty promises of improvement were not enough, 110mb.com is now practically becoming a paid service. They now want to charge for the use of top level domains, which nobody should pay for, because their service simply sucks. Once again, don’t let the silly numbers in front of storage and bandwidth offered fool you. I think I’ve learned my lesson this time.

Do not sign up with any free hosting plan that claims to offer you a bunch of great services. They most likely won’t give you what they promise. Even if they do try to offer such services, as they expand, they will either start charging, putting ads on your pages, or disappear without notice. If you insist on using free hosting, then sign up for 50webs of awardspace if you are a more advanced user or geocities, freewebs, or angelfire if you want a quick start.

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