dougv.com « Doug Vanderweide

A common question on Yahoo! Answers is where to find good, free Web hosting companies. More often than not, the request is that they also be ad-free.

I can recommend the following Web hosts because I have used them all for various purposes. Each has its limitations, but remember, you get what you pay for, even on the Internet.

A quick aside on free domain names: There are no free domain names. At least, none that are worth the aggravation. (For total n00bs, a “domain name” is like this site’s dougv.com, or yahoo.com, youtube.com, whatever.com.)

Some people will point to Microsoft Office Live as being a free Web host with a free domain. Technically, that is true; you won’t pay for the domain for the first year.

However:

• The domain name is only “free” for one year. It costs $15 per year after that, which is more than GoDaddy charges for most domain name renewals.
• Your “free” domain name is difficult to move from Office Live, which you’ll almost certainly want to do at some point when you outgrow such limited hosting.
• You must provide Microsoft with your credit card information in order to sign up.
• You have to use their online Web design tool, which only works with Internet Explorer and requires you to install additional software.
• You cannot freely edit the HTML of your pages with that tool, which restricts what you can put on the site.
• You have to sign up for a Live ID, which some users won’t want to do, since it is used by Microsoft to track your activities on their Web sites.

In other words, unless all you want to do is throw up some static HTML and use the few canned tools Microsoft provides, Office Live is going to be nothing but a headache.

Others may suggest co.cc. That is not a domain name; it’s a subdomain with url redirection. What you get for free when you sign up for co.cc’s service is free URL redirection.

The Korean company that has registered the co.cc domain name may suggest that a co.cc subdomain acts like a real domain name. It does not. I don’t want to get into technobabble here, but subdomains aren’t real domains; it’s not even close.

What’s the harm in co.cc’s free redirection? Nothing, provided they keep it free and don’t hijack your traffic. But if they decide to force ads on you, or hijack your visitors and send them someplace other than your site, you won’t think it’s such a deal.

Some other companies will give you a domain name for free if you buy Web hosting services; others will give a domain name as a reward for completing offers; some domain registrars (the companies that sell domain names) may give you free Web hosting if you buy a domain name. But you can’t have both for free.

(Yes, there are some outfits giving “free” .tk domain names. Those companies require you to use their Web hosting, and they fill your site with ads and hijack your traffic. It’s not worth it, either.)

Blogging

A blog — short for “Web log” — is a very simple content management system. In short, a blog allows you to easily add, edit or remove information on your Web site, without having to know any HTML, JavaScript or the like. For beginners, and those who simply want to be able to add words, pictures and videos to their Web sites, a blog makes a lot of sense.

This site is WordPress powered, so not surprisingly, I recommend a free WordPress blog.

WordPress is very powerful. If you get really serious about blogging, you can easily export your free WordPress blog and move it to a fully hosted WordPress blog on your own site.

I’m also a fan of Blogger, but prefer WordPress for its considerably more powerful management features.

Blogger is based entirely in HTML files. You can use Blogger’s FTP publishing tool to post your blog directly on your Web site. And unlike a free WordPress blog, you can custom-design a Blogger template to look exactly as you want and work exactly as you like.

Plain Old HTML Hosting

Some people want the total flexibility of making their own Web sites from scratch, or need a place they can store files to show on social networking sites such as MySpace. In those cases, an HTML-only Web host makes sense.

Generally speaking, you get free Web hosting space from your Internet Service Provider (unless you’re on one of the super-discount dial-up companies).

For example, Verizon offers you 10 MB of free Web space with a basic DSL account; RoadRunner offers similar, plus their space allows for lots of goodies, including FrontPage extensions, which many users of FrontPage / Publisher will find handy for their built-in forms.

Using your ISP’s Web space makes a lot of sense, especially if what you want to do is host pictures / Flash that you will use on some other site, such as MySpace, eBay, a forum, etc.

Some ISPs block hotlinking (the ability to display a file on their Web servers in another Web site). Some also limit your bandwidth — the number of files you can send to visitors in the course of a day. None that I know of support PHP, MySQL or other important Web programming resources.

And generally speaking, ISPs don’t usually give you much help. They often don’t have built-in Web editing tools and usually won’t provide you with useful help if you experience Web hosting problems.

If you are a total Web noob, working with templates often makes the most sense. In that case, Freewebs is definitely the best there is.

You can host your own domain name on Freewebs for free, even if you didn’t buy it through them.

Freewebs offers password protection for your site. Best of all, Freewebs allows you to host all sorts of file types and to hotlink them. So, if you need a place to host pictures / Flash for a BBS, MySpace, etc., that’s a nice extra feature.

There’s also Geocities, which is free with your Yahoo! account. It’s probably the best compromise between a template-based host, such as Freewebs, and a “do-it-yourself” hiost.

The free Geocities has a pretty good Web-based page editor and several useful widgets / themes / goodies that are nice. But it places an ad on the right side of your page, it’s bandwidth-limited and getting support from Yahoo! is near impossible.So keep that in mind.

PHP / MySQL Hosting

A lot of the time, you want to be able to use PHP and MySQL. Or, you want to be able to host your own domain name, and have close to total freedom in terms of what your Web site contains.

I prefer AwardSpace for free LAMP hosting. It’s ad-free, fairly reliable and somewhat easy to manage. It also has pretty good features for free: 200 MB of storage and 5 GB per month bandwidth (more than enough for most people), you can host up to two domains on a single account, 10 MB of MySQL storage (again, more than enough for most people), and it supports PHP 5.

Alternatively, there’s 110MB. While it’s more liberal in terms of what you get vs. AwardSpace, it doesn’t include MySQL as part of its free services — which is sort of like having a car but no place to go.

Forum Hosting

If you want to run a bulletin board for free, I recommend InvisionFree, which uses the very powerful Invision bulletin board program. You can skin your board and you’ll actually have lots of control over it, too.

ASP / ASP.NET Hosting

ASPHost4Free is an option, but right now, it’s only allowing free ASP 3.0 hosting. They offer ASP.NET 2.0 hosting on a first-come, first-served basis, but there is a very long wait.

They also claim to be “ad-free for a limited time” — whatever that means. If anyone knows, please comment.

I formerly recommended AspSpider.NET, but they’ve changed their rules to the point where their service is pretty much useless.

I have also located Somee and ChristianASP.NET. I haven’t used either (although I am considering both to demonstrate ASP.NET programming). If anyone else has expeience with ChristianASP.NET, please comment.

Charitable Organizations

If you operate a federally registered charitable organization, DreamHost will host your Web site for free. That’s right: Free hosting from the best LAMP-based host on the Internet for all 501(c)(3) organizations.

I use their free nonprofit hosting for one of my clients and can assure you, there’s no catch: It’s truly free and 100 percent supported.

File Hosting

Sometimes, you just want a place to put a file for other people to download. When that’s the case, I prefer MegaUpload.

You can upload a file of up to 500 MB and it can be downloaded by anyone for free.

Although the system is JavaScript and Flash driven, and it’s supported by ads, the download speed is fast and your file is stored for up to 90 days after the last time it was downloaded; as long as the file is downloaded at least once every three months, it will be hosted forever.