vortex 69 dot eu dot org

…I feel like an idiot.

So I used dot.tk and now am using eu.org (which I found after much search), but it never occurred to me to use FreeDNS ( http://freedns.afraid.org , where I have an account ever since the dinosaurs left the earth, or about 2003/2004), for some reason I didn’t even remember them.

Until today I went to check my subdomain that links to my dynamic ip and noticed this: “A”

“Waiddaminute…A records mean I can just configure it to my webserver ip, innit?”, followed by “Oh, see there’s CNAME, NS and all the others. Let me give it a try.”

vortex69.qc.to A 144.76.???.???

Go to cPanel on the server, add vortex69.qc.to as a domain, and…fucking works.

Although as a strictly free solution it’s more limited than, say, ClouDNS + eu.org, as you can use only 5 hostnames on a free account (ClouDNS is unlimited records and 3 domains), on the plus side it’s more centralized, also easier and faster to get to work (no much waiting for DNS to propagate) and very importantly, it has one less dot (yes, I once found a  free web host that pretty much told me my eu.org sub-domain was invalid, too many dots, it was correct of course but was interestingly blunt about it).

(and speaking of that I found a free web host that forbids you from simply pointing an A record to their server, first time I’ve seen that honestly)

So, today, 15/Apr/2014, just jestingly I went to dot.tk and tried to re-register my old domain “vortex69.tk” and…

I found I could register it, for free…pretty much exactly one month after I stopped using them when my domain was taken from me without warning because it contained words deemed to be “high value” and so I should pay for the privilege (click to read about the end of my use of dot.tk, which I had used for 3 years)

So, now I could register it…

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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”.

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One of those mysteries is how the heck does my current host (a free host, doesn’t matter for now, I’ll praise them if things keep going OK) measure CPU usage.

Because in cPanel the CPU usage meter is like this:

CPU Usage 0 bytes / 100 MB

CPU usage measured in MB, now there’s something new.

And their bandwidth meter doesn’t work.

Also kind of funny was a free host that I used before that allowed 2 add-on domains, but only one sub domain. (as you may, or may not know cPanel uses one sub domain per add-domain and AFAIK there’s no way to circumvent it)