My part time job is participating in a production company. Our main production is The Soapflakes, a bi-weekly comedy improv soap opera. There has been a lot of advertising/effort/rehersal hours going into this. Coincidently, I have been put in charge of the web site, which must kick serious ass. I snagged us a snappy domain (thesoapflakes.com, $15 via directNIC) and am now looking for somewhere to plop it. If it was my personal site, I’d have no problem with a Freeservers.com banner across my site, but it’s a professional deal, and hopefully people will be coming back to the site a lot, to vote for character
development, etc., so I want it to be clean and classy. Anyone know of a REALLY free server service? I need about 15-20 mgs of space, and I want to transfer our current domain name. I could deal with a small banner, but the big ones are just too much. Help a poor amateur!
Someone told me that HyperMart no longer requires you to have banner ads on free sites. I just looked around a little over there but I couldn’t find out for sure. If that’s true, sounds like they would work great for you.
I used to have our drop zone site there, and they weren’t bad. With free hosting you get 20 megs of space. We did have to have a small banner ad, but it wasn’t bad. They only host business sites - no home pages allowed.
If your company does decide they can pay for hosting, I highly recommend Cedant. I switched to them several months ago and they are wonderful…The longest response time I’ve had to a support e-mail was 18 minutes, and that was at 3 a.m. I believe their least expensive package is $7.95/month. I pay $12.95 for 25 megs of space, and get tons of stuff - 25 e-mail accounts, CGI scripts, mailing lists, Telnet, MySQL, even secure server. No set up fees and a two-week free trial.
Opal may be able to give you a small amount of web space - I don’t know if she’d charge or not. Probably if you needed her help with the site she’d have to charge you. Ask her…
As for other services, I don’t know of any free service that won’t require banners or evil popup ads. If you find one, let us know!
If you can restrict yourself to 5 megs, I would be happy to post your site on one of the alternates my ISP (Worldnet) gives me for free. Unless you are trying to do e-commerce, I don’t think there would be any problems hosting there.
I use Valueweb.net for my website and it’s treated me very well so far. Never had any downtime, the standard bells and whistles in regards to POP3 mailboxes, mail forwards, drive space… etc. It does cost though, to the tune of $19.95/mth (I got a deal on it where it’s only costing me about $10/mth). On the other hand, shouldn’t your company be footing the bill on this stuff?
I think SwimmingRiddles would like to use the domain she purchased – thesoapflakes.com. If you offered her one of the subnames WorldNet allots to you, it would have the home.att.net domain in it.
As for any free hosting services that will host the domain, I don’t know of any. I do know that Freeservers will host it for free, but with a 468x68 size banner somewhere in the page, or for $4.95 a month w/o the banner.