I recall that the last several times I was interested in free web hosting, the only services I could ever find were sites similar to Geocities, where flashy banner ads abounded. I have since given up, convincing myself that nothing in this world is free.
However, it would seem that nowadays competition among the various web hosting companies has driven several of them to offer free accounts with no catch; even with a generous amount of bandwidth and other services.
If you really want to have your own web site, you definitely would rather make the advertising revenue yourself rather than help a company like Yahoo earn more money at your expense. But, for no cost, whatsoever? What’s in it for the companies who offer these services? Well, in my opinion, they make their money based on the growth of your web site. It’s much easier to upgrade your account to suit your current bandwidth and storage needs than it is to find a completely different host and move everything. Once you have free web hosting through a particular company, you’re pretty much locked in with that company as your site’s popularity grows. It is a good strategy that probably yields good results for the companies that are willing to make the initial investment.
You’re probably thinking that these companies offer very little bandwidth or storage or hardly any useful services. But, to the contrary, they offer much more than most of the average paid services I have seen. For example, Byethost.com offers 250 MB of storage and a full 25 GB of bandwidth! Not to mention unlimited POP email accounts, 5 MySQL databases, etc. I have heard from friends that their hosting service is everything that they advertise it to be. I signed up for an account for my wife and they have been very quick to answer questions and provide support so far. If everything goes well, I may move this site over for awhile also.
Aside from Byethost, there are other companies that offer similar services that may be worth checking into. For a complete list of bannerless hosts, check out these search results on free-webhosts.com. It seems that PHP and MySQL along with a slew of other indispensable services seem to exist across the board.
If anyone has any experiences or recommendations on any of these services, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
