Back in the beginning of 2001 I could find any webhost that offers free hosting and a cgi-bin....etc, etc.

Now everyone charges you, and even if they do give you a cgi-bin they don't allow chmoding. Yes I can afford the costs of a monthly but before I go spending the money I need to make sure all my code works on someone elses server (aka guinea pig).

Whatever happened to the good old days...

Oh yea, the internet and computer world went broke :o :D

Originally posted by revatlanta
Oh yea, the internet and computer world went broke :o :D

Maybe because they offered everything for nothing.

The .COM Industry died. And the economy right now is not good.

Advertisers don't want to pay what they used to pay a couple of years ago.

All that resource, free to you, was to be paid for by schemes that just didn't work. Either peoply did not click through and buy, or did not upgrade to paid services, or .....

You can install web servers on your home computer to test it. I have links to many many things, however that is one area I don't have a link to. People have posted it before, not sure what you'd use as the search term(s) to dig it up. For some reason foxsomething pops into my head, but I could be wrong. It was free, available off sourceforge (I think).

Edit: The mind works in strange ways.. it was foxserv: http://sourceforge.net/projects/foxserv I remembered it. Try that.

Originally posted by WCSWEB
The .COM Industry died.

I wouldn't say it died, but I would say that it became smarter. When people started using realistic business models, the everything-for-nothing days slowly came to end.

Actually everything wasn't for nothing. The investors were the ones paying for it all.

Thanks for the help Chicken. I've literally looked for over 4 hours for a web host that is free and cant find crap. No one offers PHP or CGI any more. I miss the old days. :(

I think you can get basic hosting with PHP and CGI for under $10 a month. You spent 4 years searching for a free one?

Why does everyone want everything for free?

If my bandwidth carrier, data centre was free and the servers I host were free and I didnt have to work to pay my mortgage and kids education, then maybe - just maybe I would have an incentive to offer free hosting!

If I told you my outgoings just for hosting 25 servers, you would most likely cry :bawling:

I think many of these so called "free hosts" realised that.

We'd really love to provide free hosting, but unfortunately servers cost money, bandwidth costs money, taxes cost money, space costs money, food costs money, living costs money, and so on. In the dot com boom, they got a lot of venture capital invested in dumb ideas that had "dot com" appended, so that is one reason why there used to be a lot of free .

Another thing is that revenues from banner advertising pretty much died, which was one way a lot of free hosts made money.

Originally posted by ClusterMania
Actually everything wasn't for nothing. The investors were the ones paying for it all.

for a risk they were hoping for a reward, LOL as a shorter of stocks I found the markets to be very profitable. I got burned on a few but made out on a lot.

I would like to thank yahoo, ariba, and priceline for some of the best moves ( downward ).

funny thing is I'm now long those stocks LOL

TripleSoft... I think you need to revise your signature to make it shorter.

And what was the point of your post? I hope it's not an attempt at advertising. -_-;;;

Originally posted by revatlanta
Whatever happened to the good old days...Well, think of it this way. Say you own a t-shirt business. You pay to buy the t-shirts, you pay an artist to design them, and then you pay a printer to print them. Then you pay for rent to open your store, you pay for advertising, and you pay for someone to run the store.

... And then you give away the t-shirts. For free. You don't demand anything back from your customers for the product you've provided at a significant cost. How long you stay in business is a direct function of how much cash you had up-front, because you sure aren't having any come in.

If you're like the dot-coms, you'll start charging, maybe, a little. Maybe you charge just what it costs for the t-shirt. But you aren't making any money, so (1) you can't pay back the debt you've created, and (2) you can't pay your employees or purchase any new inventory. So you're screwed, long-term. Then when you realize this, you try to start charging what you should have charged, but it's too late.

That's sort of what happened to the "good old days" where businesses were built on accounting fantasies and the imaginary yet absolutely impossible dream of getting something for nothing seemed to materialize, if just for a little while.

There is no free lunch in this world, in the end someone got to pay for it

Originally posted by revatlanta

Now everyone charges you, and even if they do give you a cgi-bin they don't allow chmoding

Are you sure you arent on a Win2k box??

Actually freehosting can work if not for abusers. We still have our freehosting after several years. WarezMasters are the biggest problem makers and make up about 40% of your free members, then spammers and porn makes up another 20%, then sites that go dead make up about another 20%. So all in all, about 80% of signups are useless. We keep those cleaned out. Now with our new WarezHunter script, warez is killed off each night.

We only have about 30,000 sites we host, but those are true numbers....not bloated due to warez, spammers, porners, and dead sites like many other free hosts use. All in all though, the only benefit to having a free host is it makes for a good advertising median. A majority of our pay host signups come from the free side. That of course accounts for the 20% of sites that go dead on the free side. The only reason we dont kill off the free hosting is due to how many pay signups we get from it. Were I to consider starting another free host today, I wouldnt do it.. It's nothing but a big pain..

Originally posted by iamdave
Why does everyone want everything for free?

Because it's cheaper that way. :laugh:

Originally posted by revatlanta
Oh yea, the internet and computer world went broke :o :D

Simply b/c they were giving at away for free...

There was a bubble of overinflated potential revenue for banner ads.... They belived that they could serve clients simply by having banner ads appear on their pages. When that revenue dried up there were left holding the bag. Paying for server upkeep, support, and bandwidth w/ absolutlety no income, really hard to do that :D...

There is no such thing as a free lunch... Even on the internet.

Well since we are talking about free, does someone wanna buy me a house for me and my wife....

4000+ sq. ft with at least 10 acres of land...
Trees and a pond would be nice.

Originally posted by bambenek
Well since we are talking about free, does someone wanna buy me a house for me and my wife....

4000+ sq. ft with at least 10 acres of land...
Trees and a pond would be nice.

Make sure to get that unlimited utilities plan... Ya know $10/month for as much power and water you can use. As long as you don't use too much.

Originally posted by revatlanta
Back in the beginning of 2001 I could find any webhost that offers free hosting and a cgi-bin....etc, etc.

Now everyone charges you, and even if they do give you a cgi-bin they don't allow chmoding. Yes I can afford the costs of a monthly but before I go spending the money I need to make sure all my code works on someone elses server (aka guinea pig).

Whatever happened to the good old days...

Oh yea, the internet and computer world went broke :o :D

You're right, what happened to the net. Why do people think that someone else should shell out money to provide them with a free service which was not in fact free to them? Why should someone have to help foot your development costs?

The "internet and computer" world didn't go broke, they started weeding out points of loss, which includes free accounts.

I agree with porcupine.:)