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How To Choose A Good Web Host (When They All Look Alike)
Choosing a web host is never easy. There are just so many unknowns when it comes to finding a host. It's hardly ever possible to walk into a web host's office, look around, meet the owners, and get a feel for whether or not you'd like to do business with ...
Web Hosting: Selecting the Right Host!
Choosing a web hosting company is a very personal decision based on your own unique needs. Web hosting is what places your website into the World Wide Web, where anyone can access to it 24 hours a day. In other words, without placing your site onto a web ...
Where have all the web content sites gone?
Many web content websites have vanished or stopped in their tracks in the last few months. It's quite amazing that this has happened, actually, in the aftermath of the September 11th tragedies -- more people than ever are now using the web to get vital ...
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Launching a website is the crucial step that will transfer your site from residing on one computer to
being spread across the web to appear upon thousands of monitors throughout the globe. However, many shrink from the very thought of web hosting, looking upon it as an expensive, time-consuming process.
Although this is true with many web hosting providers, you can obtain ad-free, high-quality web hosting...
at absolutely no cost to you.
In the process of writing article, I launched over twenty websites with various free web hosting providers. I discovered that there are literally hundreds of companies that provide free web hosting. To my disappointment, most have poor service.
Nearly every provider placed annoying advertisements on each of my pages, promoting cigarettes and other products that my visitors would think that I endorse. Even when the advertisements were for decent products, their flashy animations detracted greatly from the content of my site. (Hint: With Internet Explorer, if you visit a site with distracting animations, press the "escape" key. This will usually stop them.)
Another disadvantage of most free web hosting services is that the providers often sell their clients'
email addresses to SPAM companies. Ever since I began registering for free web hosting, the amount of SPAM I receive has tremendously increased. One hosting company offered to sell me a Master's Degree - for a "low fee" I could get a M.A. in only five days - no studying, classes, or even a highschool diploma is required. Another email "invited" me to a birthday party for the CEO's son, with party favors including a free 30-day trial for their web hosting service.
Utilize Your Resources
If you use either AOL or AT&T for your Internet service, you have free access to high-quality, ad-free web space. You don't have to pay an extra fee or go through the hassle of registering for free web space because it's already included in your service plan. For AOL users, enter AOL keyword: FTP. AOL provides five megabytes per username, totaling 25 megabytes.
Your web address will be http://members.aol.com/AOLusername.
For AT&T users, AT&T gives you two addresses at which your site can be reached: http://home.att.net/~yoursite and http://yoursite.home.att.net.
The Competition...
I ranked 20+ free web hosting companies from tremendous to terrible. Using a point-based system, I added a point to their score for every positive service they provided, and each negative service they provided (such as displaying ads on your site) deducted a point from their score. (Maximum possible points a company could earn was 20 points) After all this was done, two companies stood at the top of this list - whose peerless scores far surpassed the scores of any other company! Earning 18 and 14 points respectively, these two companies far surpassed even major companies like YAHOO! (earning 4 pts), Lycos (6 pts), and even Microsoft (5 pts)!
#1: FreeWebs
FreeWebs resulted with the highest score, claiming the prize for the ultimate web host. With 100 megabytes of ad-free space, FreeWebs surpasses many paid services! FreeWebs also provides the following free services:
- Website builder (If you haven't already created your own website)
- Hit counter
- Chat rooms
- Forums
- Guest books
- And much, much more!
Please note that FreeWebs gives you code to cut-and-paste into your website. If you don't know HTML, simply copy the code to your Clipboard, then open up your webpage with Selida (We discussed this in the April newsletter. Refer to the end of this article) in "Design Mode." After that, click where you want the feature to go, and select "Pase in HTML" from the "Edit" menu. And Selida does the rest for you. It's that easy! |
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