PureBasic Forums - English

I looking for a good free host that I can put my stuff on along with a website, are there any good free ones that any of you can point me too. Something that has decent space (100 meg or more) and bandwidth to support it
I hoping theres a few hosts out there that don't spam you with ads on your site along with your mail box, I can tolerate some ads but somthing not over the top. I'm finding it hard to find such hosts.

http://www.phpnet.us/

http://www.sitesled.com/

Wow, looks really good!

Personally I'd advise getting a very cheap webhotel/domain hoster.
Like the one I use www.domeneshop.no (english pages) http://www.domainnameshop.com/?currency=USD&lang=en

They provide full solution, and very cheaply, they are also one of the bigger ones in Norway as well one of the cheapest.
They take security and uptime seriously, great support in the fe cases when you need one. In the years I've been a customer I'd only had to contact them a few times for questions I had. Never had issues with the site itself www.emsai.net
and best of all, no bandwidth limitation (as long as it's not insanely big that is)

They have both PHP 4 and PHP 5 (if requested) PHP 4 is always the latest (they are very quick to update when PHP security fixes are released etc)

If you allready got a domain with a bigger domain company like godaddy or similar, check their offerings on webhotels. They are usually very cheap, and has great support for pointing your domain to the webhotel making the domain transparent. Like in my case a self contained site despite being on a "hotel" server.

So if you plan to do some commercial stuff or professional stuff that is what I'd recommend.
If it's something else, see if you find a organization related to what you plan to host as they tend to be very happy to help you out with stuff like this.

I would also suggest looking at cheap ones too. I use One.com (Was originally B-One.net). You get 1gb webspace, unlimited transfer, unlimited emails, fast network all for £0.90 per month. They are excellent!!!

Sorry to post without contributing, but what is the motivation of the free hosts if they don't charge any money or do any advertising? I don't see a (legitimate) angle for them.

@netmaestro

At least one of those two free sites mentioned above are 404 hosters.
By this I mean hosters that direct 404 (page not found) to advertising pages.
I've also heard this called 404 trafficing, or 404 traffic selling.

And considering that php us hoster there deletes sites that has had no traffic for a month,
well you can imagine the amount of peeps ending up with 404's.
Search engines like Google etc, retain urls a long time after a site is gone.

Nothing is free, and as you pointed out netmaestro wht the heck are their angle? Now you know.
I'm always supicious of free offerings that do not explain how the heck they manage to "stay alive".
I looked at both those free sites and they sound too good to be true,
amusingly there is no mention of how they earn revenue nor of their 404 traffic sales

I use Surftown http://www.surftown.com (simular to One.com / B-One.com). A little more expensive (from 99p / month), but more functionality than B-One. Especially if you choose Linux hosting.

With Advanced Linux you get a lot at Surftown! With a few mouseclicks you can install / remove the following Linux Apps;

Blogs
* b2evolution
* feedonfeeds
CMS & Portals
* e107
* Mambo CMS
* PHP Nuke
* vtiger
* xoops
Forums
* phpBB
* SM Forum
* XMB Forum
E-Commerce
* CubeCart
* osCommerce
* PHPAdsNew
* phpcoin
* SugarCRM
Support Systems
* CS Live Helper
* helpcenterlive
* phpMyChat
* phpMyFAQ
Galleries
* Coppermine Photo Gallery
* Gallery
Misc.
* DokuWiki
* FormMail
* phpESP
* phpmycounter
* PHProjekt
* PhpWiki
* Advanced Poll
* SiteBar
* sRecommender
* WebCalendar
* WebCards

Hi netmaestro.

Motivation - sometimes not financial. But usually is.

Consider the financial angles in this scenario (ad free on the hosted site) - also think of loss leaders:

Hosting coy who sells hosting has X disk space and Y bandwidth, and has maxed up on these to get the best rates for themselves.

Coy divides this up into packages, and does not oversell despite knowing that the vast majority of clients will use less than their allocation of X and especially of Y. This is a reality - many sites are postage stamps sitting on sheep stations, many others are extremely low traffic presence sites for small businesses.

Coy then gives away X and Y, in downgraded (less feature rich) free hosting packages, using the expected difference between actual usage and the amounts sold to the paid client. Knowing that chunks of the free allocations are also likely to be unused. Coy may also throttle back on bandwidth to give slightly slower performance on free sites.

Coy now has Z non-paying clients, at no cost to self. Coy can employ any or all of many angles from here on in, getting small or larger revenues. For example:

Offer domain names, some might take it up when they sign on (small profit).
Offer upgrade incentives from free to base knowing that some will take it to get the extra features (might not be extra diskspace/bandwidth - could be forums, could be WYSIWYG editor, etc.)
Redirect missing URL's to an ad site (404 traffic).
Although the site itself is ad-free, maybe place ads in the free client admin area may carry ads, and on the support forums for free clients.
Make sure support tickets are paying clients first, but offer priority support at a fee (if needed, almost certain to get an upgrade as the hosting cost -v- support fee would come out on the side of hosting).
Utilise small returns from free hosting to purchase extra bandwidth and thus get better pricing across the board. Use this to do more of the same.

Etc.

Edit: Sometimes the means employed is a little dirty, attempting to installing spyware and etc. either on client or client's visitors. Bet you know some of these and avoid sites when you know they are on one of these.

Hello!

I have always used FreeWebspace.net. It is a nice forum where you can ask free hosters about what they have to offer for you. And mostly, you get many results that are very reliable.

Ofcourse, if you need to find your free webspace quickly, you can use this Power Search located at http://www.free-webhosts.com/power-search.php. You can find many free hosters there, but most of them are unreliable.

If I would be you, I would register at FreeWebspace.net and leave a request and wait for an answer.

EDIT: About how ad-free hosters can get profit? Well, I had a site hosted and I was updating it very frequently. I always made a new version of my index.php file to ensure there are no holes and that the website is easy to navigate. Well, my index.php files are always 1kb-2kb but when I upload it to my webhost, it gets 3kb and in rare situations also 4kb. Why is that? I analyzed the index.php file by viewing it's source from the webhosters location, and guess what? The hoster has made a script that adds a JavaScript header in every file that you upload and this script redirects the visit to the advertiser's page and everytime someone visits my website, it hiddenly visits the ad-page and so my webhoster gets much profit.

Cheers

Mmmm... See free hosts aren't really worth using. For as little as £0.90 a month you can avoid all this nonsense.

Kale wrote:Mmmm... See free hosts aren't really worth using. For as little as £0.90 a month you can avoid all this nonsense.

Very good and terse said Mr. Kale! (I just hope the same goes for my whale)

I too would recommend going for a cheap payed host. I tried several free hosts in the past, and, specially those with php support, were really slow.