Name of Site: Yahoo!GeoCities
URL: geocities.yahoo.com
Load Time: Scorching
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: The Yahoo! juggernaut steams ever onward, munching everything in its path. GeoCities free web hosting is yet another add-on. Like a little fish swimming around a shark, you get to pick up the morsels, as each incorporated venture offers more and more services and features for you to grow from a newbie to a total cyber-geek. Free entry level hosting is a great way to get acquainted with things, and plenty of extras are available to spruce up your little domain. You get site stats, Web building tools, and the chance to be listed in Yahoo's directory. When you are ready to turn pro, some great affordable packages offer just about all you'll need to build the next big thing, to sell to Yahoo! - SS
Name of Site: TheFreeSite
URL: www.thefreesite.com/Free_Web_Space
Load Time: Medium
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: The freebie boom is one of the few booms that keep on booming - millions of people getting commissions for building ever more portals to more and more free sites where somewhere down the track a consumer might actually part with some money. In the meantime, the rest of us can grab all the free stuff we need until the bubble bursts. Here we have a well-chosen and well-organised directory of all kinds of free hosting sites. Brief overviews of what is on offer are given, before you head off to try each one out. You will see that many of them come and go, so if you are serious about a permanent presence, best to go for the more established ones. - SS
Name of Site: Free Yellow
URL: www.freeyellow.com/index.gsp
Load Time: Scorching
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: In a partnership with Hypermart, Free Yellow offers a simple solution - "let us put a banner ad on your site, and it's free". When you finally tire of the endless stream of ads, just pay the monthly fee and it's all yours. The free site allows MS Front Page publishing, CGI and 50megs of space, with the option to pay for a domain name, so you can quite easily get a respectable site underway. The up-market options do get a bit pricey, but by then you will be a master and will have no problems migrating to a better deal when the time comes. - SS
Name of Site:
URL: www.freewebspace.net
Load Time: Scorching
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: These guys have taken the time to organise their endless list of links to hosting facilities into a helpful guide. By separating the hosts by customer needs i.e. business, gaming, personal, non-profit - and allowing comprehensive searching by feature, scripting, advertising, building tools, location and language - the task of deciding where to squat is made very easy indeed. There is a discussion board, reviews page, news and links - all helping to make your learning curve that little bit less steep. As usual, once you are ready to get serious, the paid options abound. It's all you need to embark on your epic Webventure. - SS
Name of Site: #1colony
URL: www.1colony.com
Load Time: Slow
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: Flash
Review: Looks like these folks have been watching a few too many Star Trek episodes, but that ain't a bad thing. At least they have a bit of colour and style and are holding onto the dream of the Internet being some kind of new society, building bridges across humanity, yadda yadda yadda, ...yeah right, shut up and gimme a free web site! Captain Kirk never had to deal with pop up windows and banner ads. Actually the deal is pretty good here - 12 Megs of space, Web-based email, page building tools, management tools and a selection of add-ons, like guestbook, forms and counter. Check the samples then jump on board Starship #1. - SS
Name of Site: 50megs.com
URL: www.50megs.com
Load Time: Scorching
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: It couldn't get much more straightforward than this. 50megs - cool. Four packages presented in a simple table with the various features ticked. The free site has enough ticks to win you over, like domain manager, site manager, web rings, form-to-email, guest book, counter, and site migrator. Of course the more you pay the more ticks you get. There is a file size limit of 250Kb on the free site, so all you MP3 freaks may want to look elsewhere to freeload your grooves, but for the average "check out my dog, my car and... oh yeah, please sign my guestbook" crowd, 50megs should be more than enough. - SS
Name of Site: Angelfire
URL: angelfire.lycos.com
Load Time: Medium
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: Real Media, Windows Media, Shockwave
Review: Having had 7 years experience and a couple of changes of hands under it's belt, Angelfire has grown up to be one of the big daddies of the free hosting world. More than just free Web space, this is a community, an entertainment centre - almost a complete lifestyle. I actually know people who live and breath Angelfire as they tweak and test their sites, taking advantage of the vast array of enhancements - "HTML gear", arcade games, promotional tools, 10,000 free images, Java scripts, animations - this truly is Web space from heaven to set the world on fire. - SS
Name of Site: TopCities
URL: www.topcities.com
Load Time: Medium
Ease of Navigation: Walk in the Park
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: About as straightforward as you can get, but not much else to speak of, this one is certainly at the bargain basement end of the free Site market. How free can free be? Maybe this is all you need anyway, and the upgrade to "paid" is ultra cheap, to get the banner ads removed and make you look that little bit less of a scrooge. There are some fairly active forums, a reasonably helpful FAQ page, a free search engine submission service and some newsletter subscriptions on various topics, a funny cartoon mascot and that's about it. Free and easy. - SS
Name of Site: Free Servers
URL: www.freeservers.com
Load Time: Medium
Ease of Navigation: Walk in the Park
Plug Ins Required: Flash
Review: Claiming to host over 2 million sites, mostly free and now growing into the "low cost" market, this one is apparently a bit of a performer in the tech. specs arena. Once again the packages are scalable, with free being the obvious first choice. The pitch here is that all their sites are free; they just ask you to pay to have the ads removed - clever tactic, eh? I'm sold! Remove those ads, baby, and take my wallet! An elegant Flash presentation takes you through the relative merits of free vs. ad-free, and once you are convinced, you simply sign up, get yourself a domain name (not free, of course) and start building. - SS
Name of Site: Fortune City
URL: www.fortunecity.com
Load Time: Medium
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: One of the dinosaurs of the dotcom era, Fortune City has come through the boom and bust and is still alive and kicking - just. Reading the 'investor relations' info shows a company desperately rationalising its finances and as a result, the heady days of wild creative abandon and charity for all have all but disappeared. Behold a conservative but well-rounded service, offering tutorials and tools to get you started, a great selection of categorised members' sites, a bunch of add-on features, like mailing lists and Web templates, and of course the chance to remove those ads with the application of a little cash. - SS
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