Free website host provider suggestions Options

[tharpdevenport]

Since 2004 I hosted a prominent website on 150m.com.


Over the recent years I have found it to become a frustrating experience. First there were garbage advertisers, ads that made code display incorrectly (or ads that had badly written code), but I learned to kind of accept that.


Then 150m.com started going down. It would go down without notice, for days or even a week, come back up and still not provide an explination. An internet search would show similar complaints from other users.


Now I've about reached the end. These passed five months, the provider has gone down for almost a month, and now it's been down for two months. I ping it, and I can still get a response from it, but it's not there (and yes, I have checked other site hsoted by them -- everything is down).


Three e-mails have gone ignored. Two to 150m.com and another to what I assume it the parent company, 0catch.com. The message board for users to ask and get answers, has not info' to help and you cant' even log in, so that's useless.


Right now my only hope, since I don't have all the pages backed up, is that the site will come back up since I can still ping it so it isn't gone yet. Even as a free user, they should care; people with paid sites that do commerce, are screwed; most of the sites have fallen out of a Google search (and Google cache's are going bye-bye, too), so even if they come back up tomorrow, other damage is being done; pages on the net that link to pages hosted on 150m.com, are being edited since it appears they dont' exist anymore, so that's a headache, too; and companies doing free advertising on 150m.com, aren't making any money. This goes beyond simply not responding to somebody with a free site.



So now I am on the hunt for antoher free website host provider. I only have time criteria, really:

• I'm looking for a short-name provider. I hate these long wording site names that make your site look suspicious or take mroe to type. 150m was short.
  
• And a provider that has an editor (that you don't have to download) that retains the code as you typed it. Before I used 150m.com, I had another host that saved all your HTML and it was jumbled togehter into one large un-readable paragraph.

The shortest one I found, 20m.com, was under consideration, but no longer. I tried to register with 20m.com, with no other choice on hand, but it turned out even though they advertise free web hosting on their site, there isn't any free web hosting on their site. It took me almost five minutes of a vicious loop to figure that out. It all leads back to the same page where you have to chose what plan you want and there is no free plan, only a $2.00 a month one. Even if I wasn't unemployed, I wouldn't plug two dollars a month into a provider that lies with false advertising.



Suggestions?

[Christian J]

I don't have all the pages backed up

Have you looked at archive.org for backup?

Regarding free hosting I can't help, except by recommending paid hosting with a proper domain name. Both free and paid hosts can go out of business, but with a paid host it's relatively simple to point the domain name to a new host. To reduce cost you may insert your own ads (from say Google) on the site, at least if you get a lot of visitors.

[tharpdevenport]

I used a combo of that and Google cache before all the Google cache pages went away, but not everything was covered. A lot of it in unique stuff that can't be replaced.

There was litterally zero warning about this. I can ping 150m.com and get a reply, but I don't know now if that means its still there, just not online or if I'm jsut pinging the domain name address and there is nothing there.

[pandy]

Freewebspace.net isn't what it used to be. But you could at least take a look at the hosts that have got good reviews here.
http://www.freewebspace.net/web-hosting/free/

Hosting Servant looks nice, good features and no ads and so on, but I don't think they have an editor. But why do you want one?

[Christian J]

I used a combo of that and Google cache before all the Google cache pages went away, but not everything was covered. A lot of it in unique stuff that can't be replaced.

Check with other search engines too (no idea which ones, though). My guess is that smaller ones updates their caches less often.

I can ping 150m.com and get a reply, but I don't know now if that means its still there, just not online or if I'm jsut pinging the domain name address and there is nothing there.

No FTP?

[tharpdevenport]

I can ping 150m.com and get a reply, but I don't know now if that means its still there, just not online or if I'm jsut pinging the domain name address and there is nothing there.

No FTP?

I don't know what you mean.


I've tried Google, Yahoo, DogPile, and Ask (Ask Jeeves). Ask and DogPile don't hace chaces. Neither does DuckDuckGo. Any other suggestions?

[Christian J]

I don't know what you mean.

Just wondered if you could log in with FTP, or if the host requires you to use a control panel's file manager or similar.

I've tried Google, Yahoo, DogPile, and Ask (Ask Jeeves). Ask and DogPile don't hace chaces. Neither does DuckDuckGo. Any other suggestions?

Bing has caches too (click the little arrow next to the URL).

Don't know much about other search engines, but try the ones here that are still active: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#History

[tharpdevenport]

The host provider is down -- there is no way to log in, and no site hosted with them is up. It's all down.


I assumed Bing had to caches because it didn't give any when I searched.

I also found Exalead.com, which helped me regain about half a dozen pages with their out-of-date caches. Thank goodness for out-of-date caches. If only Google and Yahoo had such an option -- then I wouldn't be so screwed.

[pandy]

Or if only you had made backups.

[tharpdevenport]

It's not unreasonable to not make backups all the time, or backup everything all the time, it is unreasonable, however, for a host provider to screw over everybody with a site with them, paid or not paid, informational or profitable, with no warning going off line and not allowing people to save their data. And it's compeltely unreasonble to have three e-mails ignored and no answer on the help forum of the parent company.

[pandy]

I agree with you that it's bad, but free web hosting has a long history of not being reliable this way. Few are the free hosts that have gone down gracefully.

All you can do is to find a new host and back up to avoid this happens again.

[tharpdevenport]

I've gone as far as I can with archives I could find that didn't look suspecious and avoided.

Archive.org - Exalead - recovered a bunch, but some was way too out of date. Some not archived at all and some broken links.

Archive.is (turns out Iceland has one) - got a couple things.

Ask (Ask Jeeves) - no caches.

Bing - no caches (at least not for any of my pages)

DogPile - no chaches.

DuckDuckGo - no caches.

Exalead - recovered a bunch, but some was way too out of date.

Google - no caches since they deleted the old ones. Too bad they don't offer old caches removed from the search.

Yahoo - no caches (at least not for any of my pages). Similarly, it would be nice if they offered removed caches.