The Free Web Hosting Awards is one of a series of featured Web
Hosting Awards
which review the top 20
hosts in each segment of the Web hosting market.
This review brings you the pick of
the most popular and highest-rating free Web
hosts.
Our gold award goes to Netfirms
who provide the traditional form of free web
hosting accounts, where you get free hosting in return for
displaying their banner advertising.
They offer a
completely free solution with the option of either
a free
"yourname.netfirms.com" subdomain
address, or your own domain name, a feature that
not all free web hosts offer.
The free accounts come with 25 Mb of web space, full FTP, and some
nice additional features like
a cgi-bin.
Their connection to the backbone is fast, using
multiple OC-3 and OC-12 lines from their data
centers in Toronto, Canada and Jersey City, NJ.
These features alone are enough to give Netfirms
this top slot, but there is one more feature which
for us gives Netfirms the edge. That is the fact
that if you outgrow their free service there are a
number of options to move up to which are very
well priced. That way you can just upgrade your
account, if you ever want to, without the hassle
of changing hosts to get a well-priced package.
If you
want a free host which can host your domain name,
with a good connection and good options for growth
down the track, then you'll probably be be
hard-pressed to find a better free Web host than
Netfirms.
Freeservers
has become an extremely popular service with
over 2 million members. They too offer free Web
hosting with the option of either "yourname.freeservers.com"
or your own domain name.
Their free hosting is sponsored by banner ads
which must appear on every page.
Their free accounts come with 5 Mb Web space, file manager and a
site builder
tool.
Limitations on their free accounts include; no FTP (uploads are done with
their file manager), and no mailbox, but if you are happy to work within these
guidelines this is a very worthwhile service.
Fortune
City
is one of the leading free Web hosts and offer
an advertising sponsored free Web hosting service
with full FTP, 25 Mb Web space and a very generous
3 Gb monthly transfer.
Name options are limited to:
members.fortunecity.com/username, and there is no
provision for email, but if you can work around
these limitations this is quite a generous free
Web hosting package.
These top picks for
free web hosts show quite different offerings and
approaches to free Web hosting, with what is right
for one person not necessarily suiting another. For that reason it
can be worthwhile looking through the whole top 20
list
of free hosts, because a different
organization's offering may be just the niche that
suits you best.
If you don't find
what you are looking for here, and you are interested to
compare what is available in entry level hosting for a few dollars a
month, one of the fastest growing
segments of the hosting industry right now is reviewed in
the Top
20 hosts under $5 a month
Alternatively, the Web
Hosting Awards have a top 20 listing
for all segments and price brackets of the Web
hosting market.
I hope the
free web hosting top 20 takes you to what you are looking for in the
growing world of free web hosts. And if it was
useful to you please remember to bookmark the page, it may be the only
free Web hosting reference you'll ever need.
The
Ed
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