Free Hosting

[Ascendancy]

I was thinking of asking a web hosting company if they would host my website in exchange for me putting one of their banners or ads on my website. Has anybody done this before?

[felgall]

There are plenty of web hosting services that offer to host sites in return for being able to display ads on your pages. Most "free" hosting offers ususally offer that exchange.

[Ascendancy]

So basically, I can try almost any hosting site and they will probably say yes?

[redbeef88]

probably not 'Any'... check out www.geocities.com and look at their pages.... there's so much advertising it's ugly

[redbeef88]

oh, and you most probably won't be able to have your own domain name- correct me if I'm wrong :p

[ray326]

Give AwardSpace a look.

[felgall]

Another to look at is http://www.bravenet.com - you can have your own domain name there with the free hosting and they even give you a couple of weeks before they start displaying ads.

[Ascendancy]

Well I did plan on paying for a domain name, so I don't think that the host will actually matter much. Thanks for the links.

[WebJoel]

sitesled.com and awardspace.com are great. I use both, favor the latter. FREE, Ad-less, and awardspace.com gives 200MB space for their FREE hosting. *php and *MySql support for FREE hosting, others for 'paid-for' hosting. Greater MB storage for premium packages of course. And, the free hosting... they leave you alone. -No weekly or monthly 'we thought you'd like to read this ad' unsolicited e-mails... :(

And, both let you conduct commerce... -if you want want to sell your crafts or services on your site, -it's okay. You cannot do that with most other 'free ad-based hosting' on sites like geo~.com and yah~.com... it violates their terms-of-use to conduct commerce on free-hosting and they 'recommend upgrading to a premium package' and will, eventually, probably suspend your site if you do not upgrade (which is fair and expected, of course)... :)

[felgall]

The one thing to remember about "free" hosting is that the hosting provider expects to make more money from thhe advertising they place on your "free" site than they would get by charging you for the hosting. In most cases if you obtain paid hosting and place the ads on the page yourself you will find that you are far better off financially than if you go with "free" hosting.

[Ascendancy]

I just had a quick question for you WebJoel.

You said that the sites you listed had PHP and MySQL support, but do you know if they had support for the mail() function. A hosting site that I use now doesn't support the mail function.

[ray326]

Awardspace does not support outgoing mail on free accounts.