Free Web Hosting Giveth -- Popups Taketh Away
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Samwell
Where Can I Find Free Web Hosts?
Right now there are a lot of sites that will give you a free website. Each of these offers different features and has different requirements. The best way to find one is go to a search engine and type in Free Web Hosts and then compare features.
The main thing that you are faced with on a free web hosting site is the fact that you will have advertising that is not of your choosing in either text boxes or pop-ups. These can range from very obtrusive to very minor. In my personal opinion Pop-ups are by far the most annoying type of advertising so it is better to try to find a site that doesn't use them. Also, it is a good idea to find sites with the least amount of advertising you can.
Free Web Hosts with No Pop-up Advertising
One of many Free Web Host with No Pop-up Advertising is 100Free.com. The advertisements are Top and Bottom Banner ads. They offer 25 Mb. of free web space, which is more than enough for most users. I have a commercial site with 9 pages of information and only use approximately 12 Mb of space. 100Free.com also allows you to place your own ads on the site and offers SSI (Server Side Includes).
You also have unlimited bandwidth, which means that there is no limit on the amount of traffic you are allowed. You will need an ftp application to upload any files and there is a 150 kb. limit on the size of your uploads, so you are better off using more pages that are smaller in size. This is main drawback to this site, no online page editor. There are however several free FTP programs available, such as WS_FTP and Cute FTP.
Most Popular Free Web Hosts
Probably the most popular free website online right now is geocities.yahoo.com. One of the reasons for this is the fact that Yahoo has such high visibility as a search engine at the present time. They also have a great array of features such as a lot of tutorials, email and a good File Manager. There are also two different ways to create a website online. One is the Yahoo page builder, and the other is the Page Wizard.
The Page Wizard comes with several different templates, but if you use this your editing options are severely limited. If however you are not all that comfortable with using software or are not too artistic, this is an excellent way to get a good looking site by just making some very basic choices, i.e. colors, graphics, layout etc.
Page Creation on a Free Web Hosts
If you decide on a page without an online editor, there are a lot of free web page creation programs both in HTML or WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors. These include AceHTML Freeware, which is an actual HTML editor that is very easy to use. As far as WYSIWYG editors go, you get a free web page creation applications both with Internet Explorer - Front Page Express and with Netscape - Netscape Composer. You can also create web pages in MS Word. If you are feeling ambitious and want to learn or know HTML, Notepad can be used as an HTML editor.
So look around and have a ball, creating a web page should be fun. Using a free web host is a very good way to learn before you decide to take the plunge and use a paid Web Host.
