Decent FREE webhosting: Does it exist?

Hey guys! I've been a member of Romulation for a little while, but I've never really delved into the forum...so I figured wtf I could ask you guys since I'm sure your bound to have an opinion on the matter. I purchased a domain about two months ago through Google and had intentions of setting up a blog there where I could discuss homebrew , gaming , roms , all the fun shit we adore. Well my lack of an usable knowledge in website development was oh-so apparent when I discovered that you need a host for your site not only the domain. Well the people on the Google support forum told me that I needed a webhost to host the site and that usually you buy a domain AND hosting package. Well this leads to my primary question along with a few others.

Question One: Are there any free webhosting companies that don't litter your site/blog down with popup's or spam simply to cover costs.

Question Two: Assuming there are no free ones. What are some solid choices for paid hosting when you already own a domain?

Question Three: How would you recommend hiring web designers? Would you reco an agency or to just hunt one down across the great electronic Serengehtti known as the intarweb.

Thanks for any and all commentary guys. Rock on.

-Rev

 

Well, there is http://www.x10hosting.com/, free plans, one is ad supported but more webspace, and one is not ad supported, but less webspace, like 300MB. This is the one I use for my site http://www.anandjones.exofire.net/, go to it guys. Now. You should try out http://www.godaddy.com/ or something for purchased webhost. http://3ix.org/ is very cheap, however the sites that are hosted on it are generally down for a few hours per day. hiring professional web designers will cost you a lot, you don't really need it, and you're wanting a blog, so you can simply upload/host a free CMS system such as Wordpress or something, not Joomla, bloody hard to use. That's all I know

 

Yeah, one of the bad things about some free hosts such as x10hosting, is that it is a bloody pain to register and get a cpanel account (still have to register on the Forums, which is completely separate, codemeister agrees) and that you have to log into your Forum account at least once every week, however, I haven't logged in for months, they don't actually check

 

I along with a couple of friends rigged up a cheap Linux-based server into the school system (3.6 Mbps connection) for hosting, including students' websites. Total cost of construction was: $160 (of course, we used a LOT of used/ secondhand parts). So... if you're willing you can just set up one It's pretty fun, actually, haha

 

Generally school internet connections are really good, to support heaps of people using it at once, that's why the server works like that.

 

Thanks for all of the great help guys. Now since I already own a domain name through Google, Can you guys reco any solid bloghosts that support custom urls.

IE: I own Furybox.com but if I use Wordpress I'd want to see my blog @ Furybox.com and not wordpress.furybox.com.

Hope that makes sense.

 

Redirection will work, just redirects you to the original link, but will still show the wordpress.whatever part of your URL. So setting aliases is a good choice, since you own the domain name, you should be able to do that.

 

Decent and free are two words that don't go together very nicely.

 

I BLOODY F*&%ING HATE X10HOSTING, but I use it anyways >.<

 

Yes, I was the one that suggested it to him. You have to sign up for 3 whole accounts to get what you want.

 

yeah, thanks for the massive headache anand


















-note to self...kill anand

 

i am sick of easy edits, no quick edits... even our paid site seems to require me to use it which restricts me to html and doesnt let me write my own stuff...

know of anything that allows php?

 

i'll look into it. first i need to learn php. i expect to start and finish that before 2009. and all of this is for. http://www.wishesanddreams.org/ which is my family company. the site needs a complete overhaul and a lot of new features. to update it to a professional look and feel.

 

Yeah it does look quite simple and outdated. Just HTML?

 

didn't know that, thought all i needed is a wysiwyg program. guess i'll need a new pc ... anyway thats ok because i need to learn it anyway.

could i run an old crapper using damn small linux "dsl" and set that up as a server for testing?

if you view the source it reads as atleast mostly html.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<!-- <hs:metatags> -->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta name="generator" content="Homestead SiteBuilder">
<!-- </hs:metatags> -->

i am new to all of this, with only basic html experience. but anyway i digress, the topic is about web hosting and loonylion offered me some. my only question would be about security.