Webhosting 101

The advantages to free hosting is it’s… well… free. Geocities (http://www.geocities.com), while offering the smallest about of storage space for free, is still probably one of the easiest for new webmasters to use. Their “Page Bulder” is simple and straight forward and their add-on features cover a wide range of applications from counters, stats tracking, guestbooks, and more.

They are also the only free hosting service that I know of that will let you upload up to 20 files at a time as long as the total upload doesn’t exceed 5MB. All others restrict you to only 1-5 files at a time depending on the service. That can be a total drag (no pun intended) if you have even a small site you are wanting to create as not only each page, but each graphic (including background graphics) counts as a single file.

Geocities also has the least annoying and obtrusive banner adds with few if any actual pop-ups.

The major disadvantage of any free hosting service is that, AFAIK, none of them will allow the “hotlinking” of graphics off site. (My avatar is an example of a “hotlinked” graphic. It shows up here even though it is hosted on my website). This is done to save valuable bandwidth for paying customers.

I’ve tried several of the major “free hosting” services (anglefire, Lycos, freewebs, brinkster…) and geocities is the one I keep coming back to. One of the thing you’ll hear many people complaining about is that “free hosts calim copyright to your stuff!”

Not true.

What they do is claim the right to use your graphics and website “royalty free” (they don’t have to pay you for it) for the purpose of service promotion for as long as you use them as your host. What that meas is if you design and publish a really cool website that expemlifies all the best features the host offers, they reserve the right to use copies and screen shots of your site in their advertising in order to entice new customers.

*All* free hosts do this. It’s in their TOS.

As soon as you cancel your account that usage right right is forfit.

Paid Services

The main advantages of paid services are

1) More storage. (a service called PowWeb (http://www.powweb.com) offers a full gig of storage for only $7.77/month, but you have to pay for it on a yearly basis)

2) Full FTP access

3) No ads unless you choose to incorperate them

4) Hotlinking of graphics anywhere you want as long as you don’t exceed your allocated monthly data transfer rate (your bandwidth allowance)

The disadvantage is you have to also purchase a domain name if you want people to be able to find you easily. The cost for domain registration varies depending on who you do it through (your web host, or a third party registrar).

A compromise:

There is a compromise, though between a basic free host and a full service paid host and that’s going through a free host and getting their “plus package” That’s what I have through Geocities with my Clan of the Dragon (http://http://www.geocities.com/jkarrah/index.html) website.

With most “plus packages,” regardless of who you go with, you get a compromise between free and domain-based sites:

1) You get more storage than a free site, but less than a full service site (my CoD site gets 25Meg of storage rather than 15)

2) You get full FTP access

3) you still have a url with the name of your hosting service and your account ID rather than the name of your “Domain”( looks like this: http://www.geocities.com/jkarrah/ rather than this http://ebon-dragon.com)

4) you can hotlink your graphics wherever you want

5) more bandwidth than a free site, but less than a full service site

6) no banner or pop-up ads

For many people the compromise “plus package” is probably the best solution. I’ve been using the Geocities plus package for the Clan of the Dragon website for about 6 years now and I’m very happy with it. The reason I bought my domain site (EbonDragon’s Lair) was I needed a hell of a lot more than 25M of storage for my graphics and such. I’m currently hostng with Yahoo for a 50 Meg site, but I’m going to be moving to PowWeb later this summer to get a 1GB site. That should be all the storage I should ever need.