Claire's Random Thoughts

First off, I would like to warn you that nothing is completely free. These domains that I’m about to list will be free in the sense that you are not directly paying any money to the registrar, but there is always a catch that makes most of these not quite as good as paid domains. Most of these are typically designed for newbies who are not yet willing to spend much on hosting and domain names yet.

www.namepros.com
This is my favorite and probably one the only ones I would recommend to more experienced webmasters. It takes some time and effort to get a free domain with them, but once you get it, you can do whatever you want with it, including DNS control and the option to transfer the domain away from them if you wish to do so. All you have to do is click on the links that they provide you with to earn points which can later be redeemed for free domains. Clicks are worth at least .5 of a point (many are worth more), and you need 425 for a domain registration.

www.hostbidder.com and www.betlik.com
These are forums where you can earn points that you can later exchange for domain registrations or cash. You get full control over your domain that you obtain from these sites. On hostbidder, you can earn up to 10 points per post and can receive a domain for 1200 forum points (425 for .info). Unfortunately, there is a 3 posts per day limit. On betlik, you usually receive 1.5 points for each post. There is no set limit for how many you can post, but realistically, you can only make about 20 posts per day if you don’t want to risk being accused of spam. Domain registrations cost 500 points.

www.uni.cc
This is technically a subdomain, but it’s short enough to kind of look like a domain. If you sign up with uni.cc, then you get a free optional redirect, free site builder, and the option to set your own DNS servers. They’re not a bad service, but keep in mind that you are technically using a short subdomain that just kind of looks like a top level domain if you use this service.

www.freedomain.co.nr
You can get a free domain without ads instantly here. Sounds good? Well, there is a catch. Here’s why they’re not recommended for better sites. All this company does is put your site that’s actually hosted elsewhere in a frame, so if somebody goes to your .co.nr site, they are technically viewing your page in a frame. If he/she clicks on a link, let’s say directory.html, then he/she will not be directed to yourdomain.co.nr/directory.html but rather still have the same url in the address bar. This type of domain may not be good for SEO (search engine optimization), because if you wish to optimize your .co.nr domain, then all your subpages will be ignored by search engines. If you instead optimize the original url to avoid this problem, the url that will show up in search engines would be your old one instead of the .co.nr one.

www.dot.tk
dot.tk is very similar to co.nr but may not be as good. I don’t really recommend them, because they not only put your site in frames like co.nr does, but also put a bar on top of your page saying your domain is from them as well as an interstitial ad before visitors see your site.

I signed up with webmastersroom a few days ago, because I decided that I needed a more active webmasters forum to ask my stupid questions. Their main incentive that got me to join was the 2 cents per post or 5 cents per new thread that they paid us for posting. Previously, I have also tried some other forums, but I think that this one is one of the bigger ones with an alexa ranking of about 38,000.

As if getting all my questions answered within a couple hours wasn’t enough, they raised the pay to 8 cents per post/new thread! That’s definitely the highest paying forum that I’ve seen on the internet. If I just post normally, I could make about a dollar per day doing what I would do for free on other forums anyway. It’s safe to say that I’ve found a new site to waste time on.

It’s interesting how the small incentives seem to be the ones that motivate us most. I’m not motivated to study for tests, which leads to higher grades, which leads to a better chance of being admitted to a selective college, but I’m always interested in spending hours to make a quick buck.

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.

To Anime fans out there: You probably hate the slow torrent anime downloads or low quality youtube videos. Of course there are some direct download sites out there, but they’re either just as slow as torrents, infiltrated with ads, or cost money. Don’t you wish you could download your favorite series with direct downloads of decent speed? That’s why Anime Dreamer was created!

This site is fairly new, so there might currently be a limited selection. However, series are being added at a quicker rate than the rate at which I can watch them. Current hosted series are: Bartender, Rescue Wings, Death Note, REC, Itsudatte My Santa (single episode), and Densha Otoko.

Animedreamer.info is also great, because there are very few ads. Most download sites that host large files also have lots of ads to pay for the bandwidth, but on Anime Dreamer, there is only one leaderboard on each page of the main site, and the user even has the option of hiding it if he/she wishes to browse without distractions.

If you do not have site statistics built in with your web hosting provider, then I would recommend google analytics for very detailed statistics. When I first started this blog, I just used a freewebs counter to count page views. However, this did not tell me how many pages each visitor viewed, how many new/repeat visitors I had, or where my main sources were. Therefore, a couple days after I made this blog, I started using google analygics. Here are some of my statistics for those of you who want to see how google analytics is like:

Google analytics tells me how many of my visitors were new and how many were repeats. I seem to get mostly new visitors, but a few loyal visitors are returning. This is good in the sense that a lot of different people are looking at my blog but bad in the sense that not that many are bookmarking it and coming back later. Oh well, the main reason most poeple visit sites is for information. Once they get that information, they usually leave…

My traffic is still very unstable. If I write an interesting technical article and sumbit it to digg and reddit, then I get a lot of hits for a few hours. Once the story gets a few hours old, the visitors decline. I guess I still need more updated information if I want more visitors from those two sites. I have also been losing traffic since I have been posting less in bloggerforum. My signature was a link to my blog, and I often posted links to my blog with relevant information to certain threads.

Most of my visitors are still from the United States. This doesn’t surprise me that much, because a lot of the major computer nerds are from here.

It looks like I get links from various sources. The two big ones are digg and reddit, because they get lots of visitors themselves. I’m guessing that most of the direct requests are repeat visitors who have bookmarked me. Posting on bloggerforum and 110mb forums have also helped me a bit. It’s nice to see that I have a variety of sources, because 22.12% are still from other places. I’m guessing those places include some other forums, my xanga, and my main site.

Pretty graph! People are entering my blog at many different posts

I found this interesting. Statistically, over 60% of all internet users use Internet Explorer while a little over 30% use Firefox. Most of the other browsers are almost never used, for example, Opera is used less than 1% of the time. It’s interesting how since most of my visitors are webmasters, internet explorer is less popular. Firefox is the most popular browser among webmasters, because it actually is not only easy to use, but safer. Most of the more technologically experience people use Firefox.

Also interesting how my main audience is more likely to use an operating system other than Windows. Over 95% of all internet users use windows, but only 83.99% of my visitors were using it. Windows actually does suck, but I’m just using it because it has basically become the standard and is more compatible.

HAHAHAHAHA! I can’t believe 8.14% were still using dialup.