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Free hosting for your website is the way to go for many people. It provides a basic, free way of getting your website on the Internet. How do these companies make any money, you ask? Most of these services will require you to put an advertisement (banner) onto each of your pages. This is the major drawback for many people.

These services also give you a website that would look something like this:
http://www.theservicename/yourname.com

Instead of:
http://www.yourname.com

For many people who just want to get a site up, this is not an issue. But for businesses or organizations that are willing to spend the extra money, free hosting may not be the best choice.

If you chose to go with free web hosting, there are many things to consider when trying to find the right one. One major thing to consider is the amount of space the service will allow you to take up on their server. This amount of space is measured in Megabytes (Mb).

A typical service will give you anywhere from 5Mb to 50Mb of space. Although it is usually a good idea to find one with more room than you need, it may not be a good idea to use one that is extremely large compared to your sites size. For Instance, if your website is a single page with a bunch of pictures, going for a service with 50 Mb of space may not be a good idea.

The reason for this is that, generally speaking, the more room that they give you, the more they get in return. Many services that give 5Mb of space do not require you to have ads on your site, which is a major plus. Many services giving large amounts of space put attractive looking and appealing ads on your site. This can cause people to click in these ads, taking them away from your site.

A common description of a hosting service looks like this:

15 Mb with 100 Mb/month transfer limit. Banner ad on every page. Full FTP access. Full CGI access. No User Ads permitted. URL: http://boberoni/yourname.com.

This service is saying that it will provide you with 15Mb of space on there server, but will limit the monthly transfer to 100mb. This means that viewers of your site, cumulatively each month, will only be allowed to view 100mb of information total. Although this is very adequate for low-usage sites, any site that will be used very often would be in trouble. It is highly suggested that you find a service with unlimited transfer rates.

This service also mentions that there are no user ads permitted. This isn't a problem for most people, but what it means is that you are not permitted to put ads of your own or of sponsors onto your page.

FTP, File Transfer Protocol, is one way of uploading (putting your site onto the Internet) to the services server. Most programs use this method and having it as an option is highly suggested.

FTP, File Transfer Protocol, is one way of uploading (putting your site onto the Internet) to the services server. Most programs use this method and having it as an option is highly suggested. The program that you are using will give you instructions on how to do so, or go to our section with the Software Lessons.

Another commonly used way to upload on free servers is to actually browse your hardrive for the files, within the hosting service. An example of this type of uploading can be found after signing up with www.100megsfree.com.

This type of uploading works great with very small amounts of files due to the very small amount of technical work, but is not suggested for large sites with many files. With large amounts of files, this process would take an extremely large amount of time and technical work.

There are many good web hosting services and many bad ones too. Here are two of the best ones we could find. It isn't surprising that these are two of the most common ones too. They both have great qualities.

50 Mb.
http://www.tripod.com
Offers 50Mb of space with NO ADS. FTP uploads, Frontpage support. This is an easy to use, free hosting service. Highly suggested.

15 Mb
http://www.geocities.com
A very popular hosting service. 15Mb will be fine for most people. Major plus is that it gives lots of easy to use tools, but also has FTP and other more advanced things as well. A great service for anyone. Only problem is the annoying pop-up banners on each page.

There are many other hosting services available, here is a list of ones that we found. They are organized by the amount of room that they offer.

Due to the nature of web buisness, and a constant stream of companies going Chapter 11, we wouldn't be suprised that within one month, half of these links will not work. That is something that you have to watch out for. Make sure you know that you are using a company that has been around for a considerable amount of time, and one that is reliable.

5Mb
www.first-home.net
www.batcave.net
www.bcity.com
www.bghosting.com
www.bigassweb.com
www.chattown.com
www.cyberweb.org
www.datazap.net

10Mb
www.bip.net
www.codename.com
www.emegs.com
www.free-host.com
www.freehomepage.com
www.home.ro

15Mb
http://www.personales.com/
http://free.prohosting.com/
http://www.freeweb.org/
http://www.com-unity.net/

20Mb.
http://www.domainvalet.com/
http://my.dotnow.com/
http://www.dove-ent.com/
http://www.fortunecity.de/
http://www.go2click.com/

30Mb

http://www.grandcity.net/
http://www.webjump.com/
http://www.dreamwater.com/

50Mb
http://www.host50.com/
http://www.jagera.com/
http://www.livin4.com/
http://www.simpletown.com/

100Mb

http://www.100mesfree.com
http://www.toolboxweb.net/

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