It’s an intriguing ‘industry’ when you start looking at it.
And I don’t mean on the “no such thing as free lunch” (even then, with current CPU power and cheap-ish RAM and HDD space, you can host thousands of “1GB free” web hosting accounts in a single server without much problem and at a pretty low cost), I mean of the literally hundreds of ‘companies’ offering free web hosting, a good bunch of them are just one company (heck, we can probably trace 70% of them to just 5 or 6 companies).
Obviously they offer the same exact pack, under different names, on the same exact servers, the really funny thing is: sometimes they get wildly different reviews.
And this post is not about any of that. This is about my search for the “perfect free web host”.
Take me, using a free ‘domain’ (which is obviously a subdomain), doesn’t use much space (running two wordpress blogs, which are pretty much “text based”, except for a couple of images and rar files), really low traffic, one would guess it would be reasonably easy to find a free host that would cover my needs…
Sorry, had to put that clip. (if it ever disappears, it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Commando”, on that little scene “Right?” … “Wrong!” *shotgun blast!*)
Problem is the domain (technically subdomain) that I use is rarely accepted, mostly due to:
1- being free
2- being a subdomain
3- too many frigging dots
As soon as you find a hosting place that accepts it you can start evaluating your other requirements. (for now I found: awardspace, host-ed, 000webhost and a couple of others)
Now comes one of my…more picky requirements.
As I like to have images and some files on my blogs (say, for example, the file with the dictations from Alistair Grout from Vampire the masquerade – Bloodlines) and that kind of thing does need more than the 2MB file size limit from awardspace and host-ed, 000webhost doesn’t fail this requirement.
What 000webhost does fail in though is that (although understandably) their definition of “inactive account” is a bit too conservative for me.
Heck I’ve had an account at awardspace for…since they first appeared? Without any problem, the account is still active. (I wouldn’t be using it, because it lacks an easy way to backup)
Why am I writing about this? Because I feel like writing about stuff, happens sometimes.
That and the host I’m using right now (and has filled my requirements quite nicely, for free) has all of their domains down, although their servers are still up, go figure.
So, yes, this is a bit of planning out things aloud.
The point I’m making is: if you’re hunting for a free web host, you have a lot of crap to waddle through until you get all your requirements. If you don’t like that, just shell out the USD$2-5 per month any host asks for.
And I was in such a nice VPS (768MB ram, 25GB HDD, 1TB traffic) for USD$15/year…unfortunately I stopped having any way to put money on paypal, a pity but that’s life.