Blog Educate | Free Web Hosting: Blog

by: Charles Ivan Palma

Free Webhosting services includes blog platforms like blogger.com or 'blogspot'. Blogspot offers you a free space in the server which gives you the ability to create your own website at an easy way. Most of the free web hosting in the market offer upgrades of new features that will give you more flexibility in maintaining your site but they require payments. Sometimes, free webhosting service serves as a free trial for a paid webhosting service.

Free Webhosting service has limititations like:
Limited hosting space
Relatively small bandwidth a month compared to paid hosting
Disabled hotlinking on files
File Type Restrictions usually audio and video file types
Placement of Webhost' banner or ads on your pages
No guaranteed uptime
No domain url are allowed. (it should be http://your-site.host.com or http://host.com/your-site )

Extra Features for some Free Webhosting Services:
Control Panel or Dashboard for easy file navigation
Free Email Accounts but sometimes limited to a certain number
File Transfer via FTP
Allows scripting: javascript, php, asp, perl, etcetera
Allows database management programs: MySQL
Scheduled Maintenance
Guestbooking
Forums and Resources
Reward Systems like free give-aways or gifts
No Storage Space limitation

Some Free Webhosting Services offer:

Automated Application Activation
Blogger is one of those free webhosting application that is allowing automated activation. After you sign-up, you can create a blog by naming it, naming the sub-domain name, selecting template then press Create Blog. Voila! Everything is finished. The problem with this is that it will not be monitored well by the webhosts. Thus, promoting scam or illegal sites that will have a great impact to the market and the blogosphere.

Activation by Approval from the Webhost

Some Free Web Host are very strong in the enforcement of law. They either ask you to complete your profile. Most importantly, your telephone or contact number to verify that you are really a human (...is there a monkey that has blog? One guy answered: "ME!"). Anyway, there are fewer sites now that implement this kind of verification process for Free Webhosting Applicants.

Forum First, Free Web Host next

Few free web hosts allows users to create a free web host until they have reached the number of posts in a certain forum.

Free Web Hosting but no video and images

Some Free Web Hosts offer a hosting service with a condition. Users must not upload or use any files of formats for videos, audios and images. Some web hosts also allow video, audio and images but at a limited amount like 10Mb.

Some of the companies that offer free web host:
000 WebHost

NOTE:If you have some favorite free webhosting service other than the famous blog platforms. Please don't be shy to comment.