A Great Free Server Search Engine

One trip to this website can save you hours, if not days, looking for a good free server. It's fairly up-to-date and has webmaster reviews and ratings to help you avoid crappy servers.

Good Free Servers

Below are links to the better free web servers I've found. They offer adequate space and speed for any type of site. I've also included the worst servers I've come across. You'll save yourself and your viewers a lot of headaches by avoiding these folks. Other details are in the descriptions.

Nice service. No pop up ads are ever placed on your site. 50 MB of space, unlimited bandwidth, and premade scripts to use for forms. Good all-around free server.

No pop ups. They put a banner on top of your pages. 20 MB of space with unlimited bandwidth. You can put your own "for pay" banners on your site. They don't mind.

100 MB of space for free. Your choice of a pop up or banner advertising. Limited bandwidth, but this isn't a problem until your site gets really busy.

A previous host of this site and very reliable. The speed is good and they have good FAQs to help you with FTP uploading and site building. They have for-pay options, too. The biggest weakness is that they don't give you a very detailed version of your site's logs that tell you who visited your site and what pages are more popular.

Another good free server. They specialize in hosting small business sites. They offer 25 MB of space and support for CGI scripting. They also have a lot of extras for the web business. Good support for technical problems.

Freeservers.com offers 20 MB of space. They are reliable, but not quite as fast overall as some other free web servers. I've had an account there and could never get their CGI script for emailing form data to work. Help is scant. They use pop up window advertising frequently.

250 free MBs as the name implies. As of this posting there are no bandwidth limits, and you can't beat the price - free!

If you're a little tired of the hassles, limitations, and perfomrance of free servers, you owe it to yourself to try out a low-cost professional server. The best I've seen are Red Chip and Aaron's Server. Check out detailed descriptions of these servers here.

Avoid Like The Plague

I've had accounts with all of the below and they are just pure and simple crap. Unprofessional, poorly managed, and slooooow. Specifics are in the descriptions. Do yourself and your viewers a favor and avoid these like chunky milk.

50Megs.com

These guys just got greedy. I had a very popular site on their server without any trouble for over a year before they changed their ownership and policies. They decided they would start charging for web space, which is their right, but these guys just completely forgot about the loyal webmasters that built their server.

Many, if not most, of their most popular sites moved. I moved the site I had there. Most servers that go the route to paid sites will "grandfather" their older or more popular sites. This means that they'll continue to live up to their original agreement. Not so with 50megs.com. Their attitude is that it's their server and they can do anything they want with it. Well, I own a lot of rifles. I wonder how the new pretty boys at 50megs would react if I used my rifles any way I like.

50megs.com is a good case of what happens when a bunch of collegiate marketeers conclude that they actually know something and jump on the Internet Bandwagon. Think again guys. You ruined 50megs.

ProHosting.com

ProHosting.com just simply doesn't work. It begins with the code they use to place advertising banners at the top of your pages. Hey, I've got nothing against advertising. That's generally why the free servers are free.

ProHosting's problem was that they are too stupid to get the code that places the ads to work. They leave a lot of "open ended" coding which has a very negative effect on your pages. Tags, especially <table> tags are corrupted and your pages look like crap.

They'll pull your site with no warning or comment. You'll never know what happened. I don't know what method they use to measure your sites bandwidth, but it's as screwed up as their advertising code. They'll pull your site for bandwidth violations when none exist.

Overall, ProHosting's free and for-pay service is bad. They have so many bugs, I doubt they'll ever get them all ironed out. To top this off, they're rude and unprofessional in every aspect of server administration.