We are all looking for something for nothing, and when you mention that phrase in the web hosting world, it can only mean one thing. Free web hosts. Now I don’t often recommend free web hosts to people, cause you never know when they might fall off the radar – and take your web site with them. However, here are some of the better free hosting solutions out there.
With 110MB Hosting you get 5GB of free no-ads hosting to setup shop. So where is the catch? They seem to get all of their income from upgrades and other related services. You also get PHP 5, 300 GB of Bandwidth and MySQL 5.
Agility Hoster looks to use the free hosting account they provide as a gateway into other services too. On the free plan, you get 2 addon domains, 5GB of bandwidth, and 200MB of disk space.
When looking for free web hosts out there, doteasy was the only one that stuck out as a name I had heard before. The free plan they provide will give you 1GB of bandwidth, 100MB of storage and up to 10 e-mail accounts.
I hate to say it, but Freehostia is probably one of the cheesier looking out of the bunch. They do provide 250 MB of storage, 5 GB of monthly bandwidth and hosting for 2 domains.
HostWQ.net calls themselves the ultimate source for free and premium web site hosting. Do they deliver? Well for free you can get up to 300 MB of disk space and 10 GB of bandwidth a month. Very promising, to say the least.
Are you a free web hosts or do you know of a free web host that can do any better? Drop me an e-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com or leave a comment and let me know.
James Bond’s rival Goldfinger was obsessed with gold. I am a man obsessed with web hosting. So does that make me Hostfinger? I am sure of two things. Yes, there will be a web host by that name soon if there isn’t already and I think I’ll stick with the web hosting industry’s media rock star as my self-proclaimed title for now.
When is a domain name squatter not a domain name squatter? When they are in the business of domaining.
Find yourself in the need of a portable data center? Now I am not talking about a mobile home with a few racks inside of it. HP’s latest release is a new Performance Optimized Data Center, or otherwise referred to as POD. Think of it as a shipping container filled with everything you would need for a data center.
It happens from time to time. You see an amazing web site, and you ask yourself, “How was that web site made?”. Now, instead of hunting through the web site source code you can plug the domain name into this simple tool – and get all the information you need.
What would I like to have today? Lets see. I will have a large data center mashup map, a side of hosting tools (just remember to hold the tomatoes), a HP performance-optimized datacenter and a definition on what domaining is all about? For here or to go? I think I am about ready to go – because the Web hosting Show is now on the air.
Using Twitter for Server Status Updates?
Why is it a Good Idea?
It mixes support and the new social web, plain and simple. Web hosting is often seen as the old grandfather that listens to gangster hip-hop. We are trying to be cool, but we always seem one step behind in the times. It would also cut down on support requests, because customers and clients would eventually learn that any updates there are, will be posted to the Twitter account for the web host in question.
Why is it a Bad idea?
The negative impact in all of this is Twitter is probably down more than any web host out there. This could cause mass panic if both a server was down, and Twitter was down at the same time. Then, those who praised you for unique hosting support would be calling you up saying, “How could you rely on such a flaky service?”. There are other Twitter-clones or Twitter-like services out there, but if you want to be where the people are – Twitter is where it is at.
My final thought on this is that it would be a generally good idea. If you had problems with Twitter or the Twitter clones out there, you could always roll you own update service with WordPress and a unique set of themes and plugins. For an example of that, see the Prologue plugin. Web hosts need to think outside of the box, and this might be a good way to do just that.