[bonniescotland]

Hopefully I’m in the right forum for this question.

Any ideas what is a good free web host?

I’d prefer about 100mb free space (though will settle for 50mbs if I have to)

Ad free would be nice, but I’m realistic so can live with ads if need be.

Don’t want my own domain name, (I actually want my website to be difficult to find because I only want to email the link to a few selected people)

The main thing I need is I have some mpeg4 files, mov files and flash files (swf and flv) which I want to have on my site. I’ve been looking at a lot of free web hosting sites some say they don’t allow those kind of files, others don’t mention what kind of file formats you can have so whilst I’ve seen some good free hosting sites, I have no idea whether they will allow the above file types.

I did my website in dreamweaver so would be nice to upload that directly but if not I will just upload the individual html pages.

[red rocket]

Awardspace should be okay for your purposes.

[bonniescotland]

Hi Thanks for your reply, I had a look at award space before and they look pretty good, but unfortunately in their terms of service:

"The following file types are restricted from uploading on AWARDSPACE.COM free web hosting - .htacl, .htaclu, .avi, .mov, .mp2, .mp3, .mpeg, .ram, .asf, .quota, .vbs, .shs, .scr, .exe, .cmd, .torrent, .wmv, .wma, .rm, .zip, .htacl, .htaclu, .avi, .mov, .mp2, .mp3, .mpeg, .ram, .asf, .quota, .vbs, .shs, .scr, .exe, .cmd, .torrent, .wmv, .wma, .rm, .zip"

So I wouldn't be able to put my mov mp2 files on there.

[besson3c]

If you have movie files, the list of providers that are willing to provide you with free bandwidth is a very short list indeed, if at all. Bandwidth costs money.

I suggest either using your home machine and see if you can get away with doing so, or else simply pony up for some cheap hosting. If this website is at all important to you, you will need to pay to have it online.

[bonniescotland]

Actually now you mentioned Award space, I did notice that there seemed to be no restriction to flv files, so I might change my mov files to flv so that may solve the problem.

I also notice there was a link on their site to
Unlimited-Space.com >> Australian Web Hosting and Domain Name Registration

Has anyone tried this? I'm in Australia and it is in Australian dollars so looks pretty good to me. $59 a year for hosting, then $10 to $29 for domain registration (depending on what domain you pick). I might bite the bullet and pay for hosting and a domain. But I just don't want to sign up for something paid if they are no good. My main thing is being able to know that I can upload mov mp2 and flv files to them. Also wondered how much is their upload file size. I guess I can email them, but wondered if anyone knows

[Z's Mac]

You're going to have a really hard time finding free space for movies because they take so much more bandwidth than text files. Ad-based hosters (free hosting) won't make enough money off the ads they put on your site to make up for the bandwidth they have to pay for you to put movies there. You could always put them on youtube or something if you're just wanting to link to them.

On the other hand, if you wanted to pay a small amount for hosting your movies, I've always used Globalcon.net for hosting because they're pretty reasonable. For $7/mo you can get your 100MB plus 2GB transfer (although they don't care too much if you go over once in a while) with your own domain name (no extra charge). They're fairly small I think (a few thousand customers) and so they're pretty fast and personal with their service.

[bonniescotland]

Thanks for the tip about Globalcon.net I just checked them out and they sound pretty good, $49.95 (I'm assuming USD) basic package includes domain name. Well I think it might be a choice between them or Unlimited-Space.com

Well it seems what you are all suggesting about me to pay for hosting is probably the best way to go, I wondered why most of the free sites won't allow movies but I guess that makes sense about the bandwidth problem.

Well I'll either get a free host and just link my movies to utube (as you suggested) or bite the bullet and pay for hosting. One of the reasons I wanted free hosting is because I am yet to decide on a suitable domain name, and also I don't want to be easily searchable at the moment as only want people who I give the link to to know about the site, so I kind of liked the idea of having one of those crazy subdomain names that's hard to find.

Also If I do pay for hosting I want to find out what file formats they allow first and most of the sites don't seem to tell you that until you actually sign up. I don't want to pay for something and discover I can't upload my movies.

Anyway thanks for all your suggestions, it's given me a couple of different options to explore. Anymore suggestions are welcome too.

[bonniescotland]

I meant to add strangely enough geocities seems to allow mov files, as I have a separate free site with them at the moment (re something else) and I uploaded a movie (also says mov okay in it's support page) and it works fine. but it's 15mb space only with Geocities which means I can only put some of my files on them. I need about 50mg for this other website I want hosting for.

[Z's Mac]

Originally Posted by bonniescotland 

I meant to add strangely enough geocities seems to allow mov files, as I have a separate free site with them at the moment (re something else) and I uploaded a movie (also says mov okay in it's support page) and it works fine. but it's 15mb space only with Geocities which means I can only put some of my files on them. I need about 50mg for this other website I want hosting for.

You're right to assume that it's USD. And you probably wouldn't want basic package since it's only 10MB of space. However, if you pay yearly you get two months free so the 100MB it would be $69.99/yr.

As far as making your site hard to find, many search engines (maybe all?) use "robots" to look over your site. You can include a file called robots.txt in your main directory that tells the robots to stay out of certain or all directories. I'm sure there are other resources, but Robots Exclusion Standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is an expedient way to learn about keeping these robots at bay and how easy it is.

Good luck finding a solution.

[bonniescotland]

Well I didn't know about that robots exclusion stuff, that sounds of interest.
I had a read of that wikipedia entry and it is quite interesting, though I'm not quite sure how to make a robots.txt file still

wikipedia advice below:

"This example keeps all robots out:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The next is an example that tells all crawlers not to enter into four directories of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Example that tells a specific crawler not to enter one specific directory"

So I'm guessing I'd just make a text file with the following text to keep robots and crawlers out?:

"User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/"

Then save it as robots.txt? And keep the robots.txt file in the same folder as the website?

Wikipedia also says that another way is to type:

"<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
within the HEAD section of an HTML document "

It says though that not all robots support this, but I might do this meta name stuff as I understand how to add a meta name tag.

Just one other thing, the main thing I don't want people to be able to do is to google my name and find my site, however I do want my name on the actual site, so I'm guessing that if I have my name as a photo only and not as text that if anyone googles my name they won't come up with the site?

[bonniescotland]

Well I didn't know about that robots exclusion stuff, that sounds of interest.
I had a read of that wikipedia entry and it is quite interesting, though I'm not quite sure how to make a robots.txt file still

wikipedia advice below:

"This example keeps all robots out:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The next is an example that tells all crawlers not to enter into four directories of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Example that tells a specific crawler not to enter one specific directory"

So I'm guessing I'd just make a text file with the following text to keep robots and crawlers out?:

"User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/"

Then save it as robots.txt? And keep the robots.txt file in the same folder as the website?

Wikipedia also says that another way is to type:

"<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
within the HEAD section of an HTML document "

It says though that not all robots support this, but I might do this meta name stuff instead of the robots.txt as I understand how to add a meta name tag.

Just one other thing, the main thing I don't want people to be able to do is to google my name and find my site, however I do want my name on the actual site, so I'm guessing that if I have my name as a photo only and not as text that if anyone googles my name they won't come up with the site?