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[Lurk]

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but I'm confident someone will move this to the proper forum if I erred.  I'm kind of a newbie at this, but I would like to start a website. I did have one a long time ago (hosted on Geocities) but it's been a while, and I'm really out of it. Would any of you guys know of a (preferably) free hosting service that is simple to use and stable? My current option is to mod a blogger type free account, but I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the tools they have. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[neon]

look around.  a google search will take you far.  you might want cPanel, plenty of free web hosts have it.

[Renton]

I used 110mb for a while. I can say it's not bad.

[Don Andy]

I'm not really all that sure about free services either, but maybe Google Pages can already fulfill your needs?

[Lurk]

Thanks Renton, I will try that one. Google pages is now google site, and I have problems with my google accounts 

[Chris Whitman]

Actually yeah, if anyone's got some good ideas with obtaining web hosting and such, I've got games and albums of music and such that I have been wanting to put on the internet for a while, so I am also interested in that concept. Ideally, if anyone's got a hosting site they could recommend that allows you a fair amount of space/bandwidth, that would be preferable, even if it costs moneys in modest amounts.

[increpare]

I use leaseweb for a medium-volume server (along with six friends). It seems okay, and costs me personally 10 quid a month.  Just about to set up a forum on nearlyfreespeech.NET, which seems absolutely charming.  Haven't looked around too much though.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I suggest using http://nearlyfreespeech.net. You can start a site for 25 cents, and you only pay for what bandwidth you use, which is usually less than a cent per month unless you get mad downloads per day or something. That site impresses me to no end, be sure to read its brilliantly written FAQ.

If you want one that's absolutely free, I'm not sure what to recommend, but nearlyfreespeech is about as close as you can get while having all the features of a paid hosting account without any ads.

[DjangoDurango]

My little sister has actually been getting interested in web design so that nearlyfreespeech thing might be a pretty good Christmas present.

For a long time, I was using exccentrix, but I can't seem to find them nowadays, so I assume they must've gone out of business or something. At that time, they were essentially the same as what I use now (WiredHub) except without databases. I used other free services for stuff like forums and blogs.

This site maintains a list of free hosts and co-hosts, with stats on ads and features and such. Surely, there's one in there you'd find agreeable.

Are you skilled with web design or do you need templates and such as well?

[Alex May]

I suggest using http://nearlyfreespeech.net. You can start a site for 25 cents, and you only pay for what bandwidth you use, which is usually less than a cent per month unless you get mad downloads per day or something. That site impresses me to no end, be sure to read its brilliantly written FAQ.

I wish I'd known about this host before buying two more years at dreamhost. Dreamhost is ok though.

[Corpus]

Same. I'm really happy with Dreamhost, though.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Dreamhost is one of the best shared servers / oversellers, but it's still a shared server / overseller.

I'd actually recommend optionally using both, especially if you have a high traffic site. You can use nearlyfreespeech for your main site, and use dreamhost to host files that you expect will get a lot of downloads and cost more on nearlyfreespeech than on a shared server. If you have a huge amount of traffic, and actually need the 1.5 TB of bandwidth that shared servers offer, the pay as you go model doesn't work as well. But I can't imagine that any of us actually needs huge amounts like 1.5 TB of bandwidth a month.

I've had my site for about four years or so, and the total bandwidth I've needed in all that time, including helping Messhof mirror a rather commonly downloaded game of his, and including tens of thousands of downloads of Immortal Defense, Alphasix, Fedora Spade, Missing, etc., has only been 300 GB total in all that time. On Nearlyfreespeech.net, if I had used that host for that entire time, that would have cost me only $100 (which for four years isn't bad at all considering its performance is much better than oversold servers).

[Hajo]

If a big portal site suddenly announces a game of yours and links to your download, bandwidth needs will easily rocket through the roof.

But usually you don't need terabytes per month, unless you host big and popular files.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

That's a trick scenario, everyone knows that big portals have a policy of never linking to a developer's site; they also host the games themselves. Unless by portal you mean something else? I mean things like Big Fish Games, Reflexive, etc.

And even if that happened, even if you got on Digg, Slashdot, Wired, etc. all at once suddenly, you still won't use up that much bandwidth (depending on how larger your game file is). If your game is 10 MB, you'd need 100,000 downloads to reach 1 TB of data transfer, and I doubt even Cave Story ever had 100,000 downloads in a single month.

[Hajo]

Unless by portal you mean something else? I mean things like Big Fish Games, Reflexive, etc.

Most likely. That happened like 6 or 7 years ago to me. I had 15GB bandwidth a month that time for my site. Quite surpisingly for me, a big site that was linking to freeware and shareware decided to advertise an ongoing project of mine. I asked them if they can host it by themselves, but they said they can't. Luckily I found someone who could host the files for me. (File size was a bit more than 1MB and I had more stuff on the website, so 10.000 downloads a month already meant troubles for me).

Maybe nowadays this doesn't happen anymore. And most website offers include way more bandwidth nowadays.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

15 GB per month isn't very much compared to 1 TB, though -- 1 TB is 1000 GB. I use more than 15 GB per month currently.

[Hajo]

Yes. It's an old story, and maybe not relevent anymore.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Another thing to note is that nearlyfreespeech.net will not bill you if you go over a certain amount, it uses only money you deposited, and will just stop working when the money runs out. So if you do get on Digg or something and only have a dollar there, it'll only take a dollar of bandwidth (a few GB) and then stop working until you put more money in, so you don't have to worry about suddenly being billed $1000 or something.

[Alex May]

That could be a good or a bad thing. You might want to pay for that bandwidth and get the coverage than be the guy whose web site was on digg and then didn't work. But yes, in principle it is much nicer not to open yourself up to the potential of overcharge bills, which could just as easily be from a DDOS attack than a Digg attack

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Yeah, although to distinguish between the two you could keep like, 20$ in it and have it issue you an alert when it goes below $5 or something (they have ways to set up customized alerts for different money levels). So you could then decide whether you want to put more money in to take advantage of the increased traffic or not.