Your Free web host - a summary

This is a summary of all the things you should be looking for in any free web hosting company, before you sign up with them. Though how important these factors are to you will vary depending on your particular needs, almost all your potential problems will be avoided if you think about the following.

Free web hosting reliability
You must check to your own satisfaction that the pages you put up on your free host will be available 99% of the time.

Free web host advertising
Are the ads your pages will have to carry on the free host excessive, intrusive or inappropriate? Remember, anything that flashes annoys almost everyone. Give your visitors some respect.

Free web site hosting access
How do you put up your pages? FTP access is best, but some hosts have other web-based methods which may be acceptable. Avoid hosts where you are forced to build pages by point and click alone.

Longevity
Nothing is more frustrating than the total collapse of a web host, which goes down taking all your pages with it. Choose a free host which has thousands of pages already, and has existed for years. We had pages on the original Geocities ten years ago, and Geocities is still going strong. But whatever free host you use, back up your files.

Free email
Some free hosting services offer web mail only, others offer a POP account or even IMAP. If you are planning to have a lot of separate sites on free hosts, POP or IMAP will let you check all the mail accounts at the same time.

MySQL, PHP, CGI, Perl, FrontPage extensions
If you have specific needs like these, check the free business hosting listings in the Open Directory. While they are the exception, you can get all of these on free web hosting sites.

If you are this serious about your site though, perhaps its time to look at paying for your web hosting and eliminating those ads?

Good, reliable hosting which has all the features you need, and no ads, can be found for under $5 a month. Try here -

This is the host that we use for hostingbreak.com, and we can recommend it.