Web Host Tips | Eevee's HQ

Web Host Tips

By Electron

For a website to be useful, it needs to reside on a server capable of letting people from all over the world access it. That's the purpose of a web host, to take care of the server and host for you. Today there are comprehensive hosting plans that are very, very cheap and paying for your hosting is really worth it once your website gains some popularity. However, if you're reading this then you're probably looking for a good FREE host that can satisfy your hosting needs.

First off, regardless of how good or bad you are at making websites, there is never any need to use Freewebs. Ever. Freewebs sucks so hard that once you start using any other host, the thought of using Freewebs will never cross your mind again. So why do people use it? They are poorly informed of the abundance of incomparably better free hosts that exist on the internet. For example, there's ByetHost, a pretty awesome host that gives you a lot of monthly bandwidth (that's how much information your server can send a month), decent disk space and no forced ads. It also supports PHP and gives you some MySQL databases, so if you want a forum or wordpress blog/cutenews CMS, you can use it. I've personally used this host, and it's one of the better ones. You can also find other good hosts on Hosts4Free.info, but be warned: the ones that give you the most features, bannerless and support lots of different technologies almost always require "forum posting", which means you have to show up at their forums and make a certain amount of posts a month (usually not very difficult to do, but highly annoying in my opinion) in order to get your hosting. Such hosts also have the tendency to "hostffervesce", that is, suddenly disappear without notice, so you have been warned. Another good host (actually a member of the Byet internet group like ByetHost - these people really are experts at free hosting) is HyperPHP.com.

Hosting within the Pokemon Community

In the Pokemon community, there are several nice webmasters who would be willing to share their paid hosting with you for free. One of these is this very site! Yes, Eevee's HQ does offer hosting for webmasters, though only if you really need it because it's a pain to set up lots of accounts for people. If you really need hosting and are somehow displeased by the hosts listed above, you could apply for hosting. There are some requirements too. More info on Eevee's HQ hosting.

Another site I've noticed is Ho-Oh's Fire, which offers free hosting also. It's owned by our Eevee's HQ member GlaceonTrainer, so you can contact her if you're interested. I have not tried it, but it appears to be good quality from what I can see. The only slight snag is that you don't get a domain like yoursite.hoohsfire.net, but a directory like hoohsfire.net/yoursite. It's possible that you could nag GlaceonTrainer into setting up a subdomain for you, because it's really much better.

Both these hosts have support for various scripting technologies like Ruby, which you probably won't be using, but they're really a very good alternative to PHP if you want to do more than includes (which should be done with SSI anyway, because PHP is a language that does much more). However, they just offer neat, quality hosting for your Pokemon fansite (and shoalcave.hoohsfire.net is a much better name for a Pokemon faniste than shoalcave.super500php.com :D ).

The basics once you've got hosting...

Once you get a free host, it's positively easy to get cracking. You'll get your FTP (that's File Transfer Protocol, the most commonly used method of uploading files to servers on the internet) details, whereupon you shall need what's called an FTP client - something like FileZilla (my preffered client), which is just a program for uploading stuff to your server. Enter your username and password, and the URL of your site, and you're ready to start making files available on the net. Remember to upload into a folder called "htdocs" (in most cases, or "public_html" otherwise).

The main thing is not to use freewebs. Many poor webmasters don't know how MUCH BETTER OFF they can be if they use proper hosts. And one day, switch to a paid host, you won't regret it. Often the prices are laughably cheap for excellent service, at around $6 per month. Wash the car and mow the lawn, and you'll raise that much money very easily.