Doteasy is a semi free web host that has been in business since 2000, and I think that’s because of their business model, of which domain name registration seems to be a main part. Register any com/org/net domain with them for $7.95 and you get a whole year’s worth of free web hosting on their servers. I’ve heard of Doteasy all this while, and it’s true they’ve been running as a free web host for a decade. Well, semi free that is.

While this means that the specifications won’t be that large for the free option; it still sounds ok, with 1 GB bandwidth and 100 MB storage space. You can have 10 email accounts and host 10 add-on domain names too. Here is the coupon code: 1003BPM.

Of course, there are also the paid plans.

The paid plans come in two types, the Ultra plan, and the Unlimited plan. Price-wise, there is so little difference between them that I figure most people would prefer the Unlimited plan at $9.95 a month. The paid plans all come with PHP and MySQL support, while you also get a unique IP of your own.

Here’s the caveat though, the free plans don’t support MYSQL and PHP, which means if you want to run WordPress hosting, you need the paid plans. However, both the free and paid web hosting plans come with standard free web tools which include online photo gallery, webform application, website creator, blog application, and forum application. Also, all the plans come with Cpanel powered backend administration.

If you’re on shared hosting, you shouldn’t be spending so much time looking for a good host, because basically, you don’t need to. Your site is not going to get much traffic for months at least, and that makes all the bandwidth calculations, and space calculations, quite frivolous. Think about upgrading your shared hosting only when you’ve outgrown shared hosting.

I have now been a customer of 5 different webhosts in total, and there is a lot of difference between each one. Some shared hosting plans can be as low as $3-4 a month. But, they’ll offer you gigabytes of disk space, and terabytes of bandwidth, knowing you’ll never use even a fraction every month. But, if you try to setup a high traffic site to make use of your “hosting quota,” you’ll soon find your site suspended. Anyhow you look at it, it’s called “overselling.”

What makes a good web host good? A good web host is always willing to listen to you. They’ll go the extra mile to solve your problems. They’ll respond to your support tickets as soon as they can. They keep your site running most of the time, with nary a down time. Basically, they run in the background, quietly, efficiently, softly. There is almost no need for the “support” option.

But bad web hosts, they don’t care. They can be rude in support tickets, or just deceptive. They’ll usually deny they have any problems, and pin point any of it on you, as well as being just lackadaisical.

What are the warning signs of a bad host? Here’s from experience…

• Frequent downtime. The number one web host problem. You could use an independent site uptime monitoring service to monitor your site, like SiteUptime.
• Long response to support tickets, or no response at all. A very common syndrome of the lousy host.
• Time in business. Related to the above point. Web hosts who haven’t been in business for more than 5 years may not be good choices. I don’t care if you have the greatest, newest hardware, or the fastest connection speeds. Learned the hard way, that nothing beats experience.
• Unbelievable plans. Although every web host oversells nowadays, it is the best managed ones that can still pull it off. But, be cautious if it looks too good to be true.
• Inexperienced young owners. Usually in web hosting, young people do not have the mellowed experience, nor the patience of older, wiser heads in dealing with irate/frantic/desperate customers. They even end up pissing their customers even more, especially when things go wrong. I’ve learned to go with webhosting owners whose owners are older, >40 years old. They usually know what they’re doing.

An example of a good webhost is the one serving this blog – Downtown Host (aff link). I’ve never had any major problems with them, and support is also pretty gracious.
Well, that’s my wish for Christmas – problem free hosting. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

P.S: *Might be taking a week off blogging, till after the New Year.*

So, now that I’m on a cPanel 11 RC (Release Candidate), what do I notice? Actually, I didn’t notice anything at first. It’s just like using an AMD and an Intel. Maybe when the full upgrade is completed, will I know the difference.

Rather than rattle on about the complete features of cPanel 11, I’ll just talk about my own impressions at this point. For one thing, it didn’t take me long to realize that cPanel 11 is significantly faster than cPanel 10, especially if you are reloading from cache. The home front end interface icons don’t just pop out one by one, the entire page is able to load in just a few seconds.

It appears that most of the improvements are currently underneath it, such as enhanced security features. According to the cPanel guys, denial of service attacks by brute force now look like they are handled much better, by a disabling of authentication for all the cPanel services once an attack is detected. It uses a system called cPHulk that remains transparent to the attacker while the attack is being carried out, thus vital info can be gathered about the attack source and method.

What I was told earlier, was that cPanel 11 uses a separate domain management system, but the current release doesn’t seem to integrate that yet. Addon domains are still treated as subdomains of the main domain. So that is something I’m still waiting for. You can see the difference with cPanel 11 is that you can specify the root of where you want your domain directory to reside in.

Another feature that would be really cool is the Web Disk Access which allows a user to put a shortcut icon on their desktop that links to their hosting account allowing easy access and eliminating the need for FTP altogether. Cool, but it’s still not yet available – still in Beta stage now.

So, as the upgrade will take place in stages, I can only say at this point that I’m really looking forward to the full stable release once all the bugs have been ironed out. Looks set to take the self hosting experience to a new level. If you want to get a look at a working version of cPanel 11, the demo is here.

Back about a few years ago, free hosting was very limited in quantity and quality, but not these days. In fact, with the profusion of cheap reseller accounts being offered by many web hosts nowadays, it’s possible for anyone who owns a reseller account to actually offer free hosting. There are even some folks with dedicated servers offering – free hosting.

So why do they do that? Two of the reasons I can think of as to why they would offer free hosting are:

• Publicity via banners which you usually have to display on your site in return
• Pre-selling for any current or future services/products

Now why would you want to bother signing up for their free hosting? I guess those offering it just hope that some people may actually sign up for a paid plan when they see how good/fast the servers are.

If you’re just new to the world of running and self-managing a site of your own (with own domain) then a free host will certainly help you learn the ropes fast. Stuff like changing the DNS, uploading files via FTP, designing, and virtually all the other website stuff are learnt through on-the-fly practice, without paying a dime. Of course, support is usually absent when you run into trouble, but by browsing blogs and asking questions in the forums, you will learn eventually. Then when it’s time to move to a paid host, you’re ready to not waste any time on your paid hosting.

The real benefit for the experienced webmasters though, is that you can use your free hosted sites as supportive sites to back up your own sites that you may have on paid hosting. Many free hosts do not allow you to run our sites as commercial ventures. They also come with advertisements which are required to be displayed. So, tell me what are they best used for then?

For example, a well known free PHP enabled hosts out there is Awardspace.com. This host offers bannerless free php and mysql hosting plus free subdomains. The server speed is generally reasonably fast and they even have a busy forum dedicated to addressing the issues/problems you may face. I’ve previously installed Joomla on their servers and it runs fine.

You cannot really use their free hosting to run real ecommerce sites, because they have a large list of forbidden words that can get your site suspended in an instant (think money/warez/adult/gambling keywords); but what you can do is create a site and put in some text links pointing to your main site(s). Just putting up a decent basic page or website doesn’t take very long, and then you can start to point a few links towards your other sites. Not only that, you can get any spare domains you have – indexed in the search engines just by putting pages or sites on them, using the free hosting you have. A great way to have them indexed, and build a few backlinks to your other sites along the way (all on a different Class C IP, by the way).

Just make sure you read the terms and conditions carefully. Each free host has their own peculiarities. Some just fold up in a short while without informing you. Which is why, you only use free hosting to do practice websites or sites which you won’t bother losing. I certainly think self managed free hosting has good benefits which have largely gone unnoticed by the majority of webmasters.

So, care to give free hosting a try?