Free Web Hosting at its Best!
If you’re interested in starting a website (a blog, a forum, a business, whatever), then square one for you is deciding on and signing up with a web hosting provider. A web host will, foremost, allot you a designated amount of server space, with which you will host your website.
Web hosting is by far the most uninteresting, headache prone, risky part of becoming a webmaster. Not only do you have to pay an often substantial amount of money for a web hosting provider, but you also have to put a lot of blind faith in that provider, trusting that they will uphold their guarantees of a) providing you with quality web hosting, b) sustaining that hosting, regardless of the nature of your site (and the traffic it might generate), and c) that they don’t screw you in some other way. As such, finding a good web host is a tricky business in and of itself.
Moreover, based on the nature of your website (whether it be business or personal, for instance) might affect your choice of web hosting provider. If you hope your site will grow into a strong community, you will need a web host that offers a sizable amount of disk space, bandwidth, and other things you might be less familiar with like MySQL databases - don’t worry, we’ll cover those later on. Most importantly however, you’re going to have to consider your site in terms of cost vs. capital. Will your site generate capital? If so, we might assume it’s going to be complicated, large, and taxing on a server. As such, how much are you going to have to pay to maintain your site, while still enjoying profits from the capital it generates?
I came to realize that the only solution was the look for a free web host, so that I could spent my entire budget on building, and marketing and promoting my site.
To cut directly to the chace, the web host that I would recommend, without a doubt, is this host. Their features (in terms of free hosting) are unparallelled. You can literally do anything and everything you can do from a paid hosting acount, and by using their service (perhaps combined with a domain name from GoDaddy or another domain name provider), you can bring your costs down from potentially hundreds of dollars a year to less than ten (only paying for the price of the domain name itself - typically between 8 and 10 dollars annually).
Let me show you some of the features of this free host:
-250 MB disk space
-100 GB monthly transfer
-PHP
-MySQL
-DNS (mydomain.com)
-MX records (domain@mydomain.com)
As you can see, this web host is more than adequate for any beginner or intermediate website. I’ve been using this host for a while for some of my projects, and I can happily report it’s been completely reliable (100% uptime thus far).
In future articles I’ll show you how to maximize this free web hosting experience, but for now, go to their website, and click on the Sign Up button.
Note: if you plan to purchase a domain name (yourdomain.com), you should buy the domain name ahead of time, because you must sign up your account under that domain name - once an account is created it cannot be changed from a subdomain (provided by the site) to a domain owned by you.