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Home » Technical Chat

The Best Free Web Hosting Site I’ve Found So Far…

Submitted by J. Pisano on February 11, 2008 – 11:57 amComments    


I’m sure as soon as I post this, I’m going to get a lot of feedback from others suggesting other great free hosting sites…and I welcome the feedback!  I’ve been looking for a free hosting site that allows me to have a “work lab” for a number of experiments that I’m currently working with that involve the Internet.  Because I want to leave my bandwidth at a maximum for the readers and subscribers of MusTech.net, I don’t want to do some of experiments at this site and reduce the experience of the users here.

I came across one of the fastest and full functioning cluster based web hosting service I’ve found to date a couple of weeks ago: http://freehostia.com.  If you are a looking for a feature rich, free host that doesn’t bombard you with advertisements or banners (bannerless) and provides you with REAL tools such as Perl, PHP, and MySql databases this might be a host solution for you.  

If you are person that doesn’t need a whole lot of customization capability and are not tech-savvy, I’m still recommending http://wordpress.com and http://blogger.com  for your web log hosts.  You can be up and running on them in about 5-10 minutes. 

If you are a person looking for more control and more high-end Internet web applications AND don’t want to pay for it as you are trying these things out then… I suggest giving freehostia.com a try.  It’s one of the only free hosts that I know that provide MySql, Perl, PHP and complete FTP support.

Here are some of the features of the site that are completely free:

  • 250 MB of Storage
  • 5 GB of monthly bandwidth
  • 3 POP3 accounts
  • 1 MySQL database with 10 MB dB space
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • PHPMYadmin
  • 2 domain support
  • 10 subdomain support
  • SSL support
  • SSI support
  • Automatic  Backups
  • Detailed Stats
  • and more!

I’m pretty impressed with the speed of the site as well.  They are using Dual P4 Xeon as the minimum server configuration and have a 100MBit per connection to each server with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.  If you are looking for a lot more, they have plans starting at $1.99 U.S. per month. 

I am going to continue with my host site for MusTech.net, but will be looking into some paid options with FreeHostia in the future for other endeavours.  I had a lot of problems with bluehost.com back in November when I tried to switch over to it.  The bandwidth and the space were not an issue with bluehost, but the CPU clock time allocations we’re literally bringing my site to a halt.   Any others out free hosts out there that you like? 

             Dr. Joseph M. Pisano

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  • Hi everyone, good post Joseph.

    As Jason says, most free providers offer the free service simply to entice subscribers to take up their paid hosting. The problem is that the free service creates a conflict of interest for their paid hosting; hence they gradually feel compelled to reduce it's usefulness in order to push free subscribers to coff up. There is one company, however, which offers only free hosting hence has no reason to holdback on any functionality. Check out my review for their service here: http://www.domain.net46.net/the-best-free-web-h...
  • sdfjoi8458
    Hi,

    Try free-whd.com, It is a good free web hosting directory. I am sure you will find the free web host you are looking for.

    Regards ;)
  • For that specs it's not bad. But I'm always wary of the huge variety of free hosts out there, you always get what you pay for.
  • Rob Brend
    Good Article
  • Cynthia,

    I think you'll find a number of solutions in the comment section of the post. I'll lay money on the people in charge of your exchange server did not apply the server side fixes. In the mean time, you can use firefox or opera to avoid the problem.

    ~J. Pisano
  • Cynthia
    I have Windows Vista and i followed all the instruction you have to get rid of the red x. It did not go away and i still can't reply to my email or type a message.
    what else could be the problem?
  • Jason,

    Thanks. I think a lot of people start out with a freehost and then do end of purchasing a plan if they "get into it". I did a very long time ago... do you remember geocities? It's still around, but it was one of my first efforts... poor at that! I also tried googlepages for awhile and found it too limiting.

    I was "messing" around with Freehostia and was able to install drupal, joomla, and wordpress successfully (granted I had to delete the mySQL everytime I changed because you could only have one). They have most of the high end features in their "free" offering that any other provider -provides for cost.

    I think most musicians and music educators will find the "EASE" of wordpress.com and blogger.com very inviting and there certainly are enough features for the casual blogger, but if you want to start experimenting with a more powerful feature set, are technical savvy, and don't want to pay anything -FreeHostia is a REAL bargain at $0.00.

    By the way, your "prolificness" at blogging is a real inspiration to all of us! Keep up the amazing work! I was thinking about you today as I was introducing the Jose White String Quartet today... I thought, I wonder if Jason has played with these guys? Funny how the blogging and bloggers are always on my mind now...
  • Cool! You know, I wonder how a company like this can include an option like this and still be profitable. It would be interesting to know how many people start with a free hosting plan and then upgrade to a paid plan for the additional features. I'd guess that a lot of people end up upgrading. Hmmm... actually, this is probably a good business plan. I wonder why more companies don't offer this?

    I echo your recommendation of WordPress.com and Blogger.com for those just dipping their toes in the blogging pool. Both services are a great way to get a feel for the terrain without a financial commitment.
  • Ken,

    Yes it does, as a matter of fact they have a free installer that will add it once you sign up. It really is an amazing free service. There does seem to be some problem with generating smtp mail from within an applicaiton, but I haven't run into it yet... (They state this somewhere...so I've read).

    ~J. Pisano
  • Dr. Pisano-

    Thanks for this information...so I could host a wordpress.ORG site at Free Hostia?
    That would be great!

    -Ken
  • excellent post
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