Search engine for free web hosting

http://www.freewebspace.net

I am surprised that there is that much free web hoster and that you can easily get more than 50 Mb. The search engine allow you to filter through many criteria like : Do you want ads?, How do you want to upload the files?, are CGI-BIN available?, Does you website will be a sub-domain or directory?

So if your are interested in building a web site, this is the place to go to shop for your host.

There's always a catch with these. I just searched for something with decent scripting support and no ads. The first I found is amfu.com. Their "free" hosting requires a $25/year domain subscription. $25/year is quite expensive for their offering.

The second was 0freehosting.com which seems to have no hosting at all, just google ads to other hosts. I gave up at this point.

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The bottom line is you're not going to get decent ad-free hosting for free from a place like this.

If you do your research, excellent quality hosting for a small site is $2-5/month including a domain name.

About 18 months ago, I set up a true free webhosting service with no catches for BGDF members. Lots of people said they were interested when I proposed doing it and while I was setting things up. In the end, I got exactly 1 taker who activated his hosting but never set up a site there.

I had another look. My basic requirements are no ads, php/mysql, and 10 meg of storage (basically suitable for a simple ad-free site). The two I mentioned were the first two on that list. Continuing down are a bunch that want you to be active posters in their forums (I didn't see what the forums are about), one that requires you to sign up for a porn site, one requires you give them permission to sell all personal information you give them to 3rd parties, and one has required particiation in their banner exchange (not exactly ad-free).

Even if a host sounds good, how do you know they're not going to just disappear in a few weeks taking your site with them?

Setting up a basic free hosting service costs about $5/month with no upfront fees, and takes about 20 minutes to get going plus coding the site's page. There's a lot of script kiddies running these services for fun and as soon as they lose interest your site vanishes.

Free hosting is popular with spammers and people running phishing schemes, making it that much more likely the service will be shut down or the servers blocked.

If you're really interested, take a look at www.webhostingtalk.com. It's a forum for people selling and using web hosting services, I've participated in them for a couple of years. There's a huge number of small and large web hosting services that have employees and owners participating in those forums. They're generally very nice people who will tailor a plan to your exact needs and a very low price, and quite often they will even give you free hosting even though they're a paid hoster. BTW, they are almost universally prejudiced against the sort of free services at the site you linked to for the reasons I've listed and many others.