Is there such a thing as free web hosting (no ads)?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been through maybe 50 different sites today and yesterday. I first check a review, sign up, then find out their service either doesn’t work, doesn’t offer what they said, or turns out to be a fly-by-night site.

From what I am finding, which is very common, are these hosting sites that are duplicable. They are exactly the same as various sites and always offer the same thing. A lot of which I’m finding require you to sign up for a forum and as you post actively you can generate forum points which in turn give you options for upgrading the service.

Now, I tried this sites iTriss.com the other night. I’ve been working on a blog and decided I’d like to host a few random pages and a forum, and possibly more. The first step was to join their forum, find the registration code, then sign up for the hosting service. I did this all with no problems. I had spent several hours setting things up but kept running into issues. After doing more and more research of this site I realized it was a fly-by-night site just like the thousands of other “free hosting” sites. It seems they generate revenue as affiliates and with their advertisement.

So it came to my attention then I really needed to find something more reliable. This site goes up and down all day. Today it’s been down the entire day and still is down. I highly doubt it will be going live anytime soon. It’d be nice, so I can continue doing what I was doing, but I doubt it. Since this has occurred I’ve been looking for something a little more reliable, but with no success. So that’s why I am here asking you folks. Maybe you know something I don’t.

Are there any free hosts out there that have no advertisement, or very, very limited ads, such as embedded ads in the text? I plan to later upgrade to a paid service but I don’t want to make any investments until I’ve set everything up. Hopefully there is a free hosting service which can keep me around without the need to upgrade. I don’t plan to host a ton of content.

What’s out there that’s functional (php, mysql, sendmail), offers a decent amount of webspace (atleast 100mb storage with 1gb transfer, for starters), and preferably does not have any advertisement, unless it’s very minor?..

I’m just getting really frustrated trying to find something reliable. That is my main issue. I don’t want to run into this problem I did today where the site goes belly up and I have no access to my information…

Thanks…

2

Free web-hosting with PHP…eh…

Can you spare 9.99 USD per month? http://www.hostgator.com/ is not bad for that amount of money.

3

So basically you’re asking if anyone will let you post some unspecified amount of data for an unspecified length of time on a reliable server, with “at least 100mb storage with 1gb transfer, for starters” and not ask you to either pay cash or run their ads in return for this service?

What do you think they will get out of this arrangement?

4

If you just want a blog, then Wordpress (which allows you to upgrade features for a modest fee) is probably your best bet. The PHP necessity is going to be a deal killer on any free site. You might have been able to do it with googlepages, but since they’ve shut that down and are “transitioning” people to google sites (which doesn’t allow people to upload HTML like google pages did), I doubt if you’ll have any luck there.

5

Swift bankruptcy.

I’ve not even heard of a free web host that permits any kind of server-side scripting or databases - although it’s been a couple of years since I last shopped around for one (a free one, that is).

6

As I said, I plan to upgrade later on… A “trial” of something would be nice. I want to be sure I like the host and I’m finished with the initial development then upgrade.

Anyway… I found a solution. No sendmail or smtp (premium hosting) but it has everything else. The community is quite helpful and it appears they have been in good standing for a while.

zymic.com

Everything has been going smooth so far. Quite happy with these folks.

7

Well, you seem to have found a solution, but I like http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net, which is, well, nearly free.

8

Wait a minute-- I just went to zymic.com, and it seems to be totally free and they give you a lot of resources. What the hell is in it for them? I don’t get it.

9

Well, free or not, I won’t host any sites with them 'cos there is not telling when it is going down. It’s good for learning though. No mail sending is basically a gone-deal. They also sell design deals; I think that is their real business.

ETA: And free domain names just get my hackles up.