Free Hosting?

JF1980

Hi, I was wondering if anyone would know of a host that provides PHP/MySQL hosting free of charge for non-commercial uses? I don't need any large amount of space, just somewhere to host a small open forum and associated website, redirected to via my .co.nr domain/subdomain. If there is one without those horrible popups and massive adds would be nice.

Thanks in advance if you can suggest somewhere, if not then thanks anyway for reading.

Justin.

piersk

f2o

JF1980

Thanks but it seems they no longer offer free hosting.

piersk

They do every now and again.

TBH, you get what you pay for. If you pay nowt, you get bad service.

andymoo

and sometimes when you pay you get bad service too.

http://www.webperf.net is a top tool for seeing which hosts are hot and which are not in terms of availability and performance. but remember that some hosts will have a dedicated box under testing and as a result I'd not expect the same level of service as what they have listed.

i looked at f2o - surprised to see a 'new accounts' bit on the page with not that many new accounts.

i'd say google then run a webperf on them too if they're listed and check they're not going to be too s l o w and that the availability isn't going to be too low.

hth but piersk has a good point there, there's no such thing as a free lunch and if there is only expect egg and chips, not a banquet.

piersk

The reason why they don't allow that many free accounts is because its not commercially viable. I think they have a ratio that they abide by (i.e. for every pay account that they have, they will allow a fixed number of free accounts.

weekender

going with the 'no free lunch' rule, you might be better getting a small account for a small price

i use www.clook.net for all my accounts and they are the best i've ever come across - they do a 'test' account for £9.99 a year, which has 10megs space, 200megs bandwidth per month, mysql etc etc - basically all the features of my £80 a year account, but less of each.

i'd go with them

mrxxlphp

With my experience in the hosting industry. You defiantly don’t want to be using “free hosting”. Because they cram many accounts onto 1 server which is normally poorly manager. There is rarely any support and they often crash.

Service Level Agreement? Whats one of them

Support? You get what you pay for.

Stuart

andymoo

here here, i second that

x thousand accounts on one server

no support

no sla

you pay for what you get but freeloaders are freeloaders........

planetsim

The reason there arent many of these free hosts is that most went bust from not making enough money, and very few remain only because they pile your website with huge ads.

andymoo

true, one day people will learn that switches, routers and all the other gubbins actually cost something in the first place.

you gotta ask where your free hosting is hosted. a fully operational catacentre or someones bedroom..... don't expect to make a living online if you host for free.

free lunches are not possible unless you know the owner of the restaurant............. even still the chef needs his wages so if the owner asks a favour dont be surprised.....

we do 40 gb + bandwidth a month - like that costs us nuffin..... i wish, we'd reduce overheads considerably if we could get that for nowt.....

my thoughts are pay your way of go away. money where mouth is or shut up.

a fair price for a fair deal is a different story tho....

gordonrp

whats your website about? I sell webspace and webdesign, but every now and then i support sites that I find interesting.
gp

POP3/IMAP Email
Webmail, Neomail or Horde w IMAP Support
Email Auto-Responders, Aliases, Forwarders
Sendmail (Exim)
Customer Mail Filtering
Web-Based File Manager
Password Protected Directories
Change Password
FTP Account(s)
FrontPage Extensions
Server Side Includes (SSI)
Private CGI-BIN
Perl
PHP
PhpMyAdmin Access
Cron Jobs
Manage MySQL Databases
Webalizer Web Stats
Bandwidth Usage Report
Log File Access
Custom Error Pages

JF1980

Well thanks for the replies guys. I know that any free hosting is liable to be slow and unreliable, but I am not in the position right now to pay even a small amount, hence why I am looking for some kind of free hosting. Guess I will have to keep searching.

I know it sounds crazy that I can't pay $10 for a really low cost host, but right now In my situation, I don't have $10 to pay for that, lol. It has to get worse before it gets better right! That will teach me to put my life into an Internet Business.. lol DOH!

Makes me think of a picture I saw once going around the net, it was of an old homeless guy in NY holding up a sign "Will code HTML for food". 😃

piersk

Originally posted by JF1980
Makes me think of a picture I saw once going around the net, it was of an old homeless guy in NY holding up a sign "Will code HTML for food". 😃

Dammit, they said there was no film in that camera!! :mad:

Strings

There's a big list of free webspace providers over here.