I believe that http://www.sphosting.com/ is the best free service. What other great free services do you know?
http://free.prohosting.com/ is also really nice (cgi!!) and http://www.phidji.com/ is also superb.

thx. :)

I like Portland (http://www.portland.co.uk). I'm using them for a number of sites. Their accounts include:
- domain hosting and subdomains of your domains
- 15 MB disk space
- PHP and mySQL
- no ads!
- mult email forwarding
There is a limit of 100MB bandwidth per month, but for small sites this is fine - I haven't had a problem with this.

To be honest, Portland sometimes experiences minor (in my opinion) downtimes and sometimes it's a little difficult logging in to the ftp, but all in all, they're my first choice for free hosting. I really like them, and I use them a lot.

I also like Freedom To Surf (f2s) (http://www.freedom2surf.com). They have:
- no ads!
- PHP and mySQL
- fast and reliable
- no stated bandwidth limit
Domain names are not hosted for free.

I don't use f2s that often since I wanted domain hosting, but they're very good.

OK, those are my favorites. I use them both, and I like them both.

==> One important thing to note when using free hosting - it's FREE. That is, there are limitations and problems. Learn to live with them and you'll be fine. If you need 24/7 with 99.9 uptime for a critical business app, then pay for your hosting.

I've always liked http://www.hypermart.net/ - I learned Perl through my Hypermart account. :)

this one is also good:

http://www.deluxnetwork.com/

portland always felt too darn slow for me. prohosting, there's this weird thing, i kept finding bits of my pages messed up. something to do with the transfer. a couple of lines here and there would always get messed up. it only seemed to happen with them.

used to love geocities, until they became yahoo and messed everything i liked up *grump*

one of my favorites is virtualave (similar guys to hypermart i think?). they give you a lot of stuff. course there are banners, but who doesn't have popups nowadays?

Originally posted by ryu
portland always felt too darn slow for me. prohosting, there's this weird thing, i kept finding bits of my pages messed up. something to do with the transfer. a couple of lines here and there would always get messed up. it only seemed to happen with them.

one of my favorites is virtualave (similar guys to hypermart i think?). they give you a lot of stuff. course there are banners, but who doesn't have popups nowadays?

For me I prefer crosswinds.net. They give unlimited space with unlimited bandwith also, but they are not too reliable.
There are no any free hosting which is really reliable though ? ;)

Best free host use geocities.com

Originally posted by Lah_Lah
Best free host use geocities.com

- The advertising they place on your pages is horrible.
- You only get 10 MB (I think... might be more now)
- No domain hosting
- No CGI, PHP, MySQL, ASP, etc.

What's so great about them?

What are your personal experiences with them?

Perhaps you could provide more information with your posts. ;)

I have had great luck in the past with tripod (http://www.tripod.com) regarding up time and speed. Yes, there are ad's though I don't think they are pop-up anymore.

Tripod does NOT offer if I remember correctly;
php
domain hosting
MySQL
ASP

They DO offer;
CGI & Java Scripting

doing tripod is taking a risk as much accounts are suddenly deleted?

=> sphosting.com is really nice: 35 mb, almost no pop-ups, great support, very fast, never down, file size limit 2 megs => I'm with this service for like 5 months and I'm still really satisfied with it!

my website: http://buffalorebel.sphosting.com/

Originally posted by ryu
portland always felt too darn slow for me. It's true that Portland is sometimes slow, but I can live with this as a tradeoff for the features that Portland offers. I've had a number of sites with them for over a year now, and I don't have any major complaints. One nice thing is the unlimited email forwarding. I've set up a number of email addresses, using my domain name, that follow me around: office@ home@ sms@ and so on. Very useful.

I started out with Tripod and was with them for a long time, but eventually I couldn't stand the ads. Crosswinds was OK, but they kept going down (I think they have ads now too).

I also had used webjump for a while and they were pretty good (small banner, domain hosting, fast, and reliable). I don't know how they are today since I haven't used them for a while. Also, they were bought out by another company (Xoom I think) and I don't know how that affected their service.

I almost forgot about The Burgh Network Solutions (http://www.tbns.net). First of all, they're in Pittsburgh which automatically means they're good ;). They seem to be reliable and fast. I like them, but to be honest I really haven't used them too much.

Take it easy...

I have used the following free hosts over a number of years; Xoom, Tripod, Geocities, Homestead, Crosswinds, Prohosting, Hypermart, and Spaceports.

My favorites have been Geocities (pre yahoo), Crosswinds (pre ads), Prohosting (pre ads) and Spaceports. Both Prohosting and Spaceports will let you remove the ads for a small annual fee ($20-$25).

Overall I'd have to go with Spaceports. They have recently instituted a mandatory ad frame at the bottom of all their pages and made the commissioned banners optional, but you can pay $20/yr to remove the ads. They are reasonably fast and quite reliable for a free service.

Storage is basically unlimited (20M to start and upgradeable in 20M blocks for free), 20G/month bandwidth, PHP, Perl, MySQL, FTP, separate CGI servers, anti-leech protection, opt-in ad banners with a commison of $0.10/clickthru. Only drawbacks are no domain/subdomain hosting, and that tech support is only available via their own IRC channel. But for free or $20 per annum its still a good deal.

I'm not sure if the Spaceports folks are here or not. The Tera-Byte representative might know as I believe Spaceports is a product offering of theirs.


NOTE: I am not affiliated with any of the above named hosts but have been, or currently am, merely a user of same.

i like http://www.0catch.com

http://imbri.com/home/ just opened a free hosting service.. 20mb with no ads.

I'd go with www.marhost.com

Subdomain (yourname.marhost.com)
No ads
Unlimited disk space
Unlimited transfer
pop3 email account (10Mb)
web based email access
Unlimited email aliases-routing-filters
support Smtp server,send-mail program
Unlimited FTP access
Your own cgi-bin directory (full permissions)
ASP support, C-script
SQL, ODBC scripting

The best on the web

marhost loads mad slow for me

VERY slow for me too, but I still don't see how they offer all that free.

Also:
You are given 10MB space to begin with, so I doubt they'd let you get over 50MB.

and they do advertise:
* Sites with excessive pop-ups are not permitted. We have noticed a number of sites that open numerous popup windows, sometimes a dozen or more, when they are loaded. This detracts from the advertising we use to cover the expenses of hosting these sites and makes for poor web site design in general. Any sites found to have an unreasonable number of popups will be removed.

I've try quite alot of free host (especially those with no ads, cgi, unlimited everywhere, etc..) and most are just some disappointing experience.

The main problem is the loading and downtime. Some i can trust are only Hypermart, Angelfire, Geocities..
But since now i'm paid hosting a won't likely to turn back..

that imbri-service seems very nice but that marhost is to slow and it won't take long before they are of the net...

Does anyone know how good/bad affari.to is? They seem pretty reasonable for a free host.

Is Marhost even still out there? My site there hasn't been available for a while and I can't get to the main Marhost site now either. They have *never* responded to a request for help, btw.

elaine
epack@blue.unix.virginia.edu