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