How to find a free host for your BH site - the basics

To host BH sites, many of us buy domains and hosting. However, considering the fact that BH sites are shortlived at the most, free hosting looks like a good option, especially for those just starting. This is not always possible as free hosting has its limitations in terms of your control over the site, but sometimes some free web space is just enough for some particular tasks. Keep in mind though that not every free host is equally good.

One of well known options for free hosting is blog hosting sites, Blogger being the most popular for reasons of its "customizability", to name just one. But it still lacks control over many vital things such as custom 404 page, redirect etc. In other words, on Blogger, your blog belongs rather to Blogger than to yourself. But blogs are a topic that deserves a separate article, and I'd like to concentrate on regular, traditional site hosting in this one.

Finding a good free hosting provider takes more than just googling it. It's a sort of an underground world, the hosts well known to public like Geocities and Lycos have nothing to do with our task, those that we are interested in are not that widely known. There are a few sites out there listing all the free hosts known to them, with the list of features each host offers and its users' reviews (free-webhosts.com and clickherefree.com). These are helpful, however, as changes in the free hosting world occur very rapidly, you'd still have to check the host in question personally by visiting their site and maybe even registering.

How and why do you get free hosting? Many hosts place their ads (so-called "forced" ads that you can't remove) on your pages, but we'll cover these later. Many free hosting sites are actually online communities and require you to make a certain number of posts in their forums before you get free hosting. If you're working on a large scale like a true BH, and need to host many sites at once, this is probably not an option for you. (However, you might try to combine this forum activity with link spamming for your existing sites ;-) ) Some hosts want you to apply for your free hosting providing a description of the site you plan to host there. You certainly don't want to tell them all the truth about your BH site, as this will surely result in their refusal to host it. However, if you provide a description of your site that differs too mcuh from what your site really is and the host finds out you've cheated them, it might result in you getting kicked and losing your site. Ideally, you should host your site with a provider who doesn't ask too many questions about your site when you register. Luckily there are some like that out there.

Next question to consider when choosing a free host: domain vs. subdomain vs. subdirectory. For obvious reasons, you are not interested in a site URL that looks something like www.yourfreehost.com/you, hence the subdirectory option is no good. But hosting with a domain name of your own requires you to purchase a domain, thus making it not a 100% free solution (and we're talking of FREE hosting, are we?) Some free hosts will only host your site if you have a domain, so if you're ok with purchasing a domain or already own it this might be good enough for you. Now, my favourite one is hosting with a subdomain as it is absolutely free, but here you should take some precautions before dropping your site there.

First, see if the second level domain that will go with your subdomain is the same as the provider's, or some different one, or if the provider has a choice of several domains. Sometimes this is not very evident as each time you register a different second level domain is assigned to you with no way you can choose from all those available. Try registering several times, with different personal information and email address, and maybe a different IP to find it out. Then do a search on Google for the second level domain in question and take a look at other sites hosted there. A high percentage of spammy and/or BH sites will probably mean the provider is known to G as the one hosting spammy/BH sites, so when you host your site there it might immediately become a red flag. However, this search doesn't give you any guarantee as a low percentage of BH sites listed might only mean that the rest have been banned already, not that there are none of them hosted by this provider.

Other things to consider: of course, one of the first things you should pay attention to is whether the host site is always accessible and how fast it is, as your site will likely be just the same if not worse. Examine what features the host offers and how much control you will have over your site. The rest pretty much depends on your particular tasks and needs. Can you have FTP access to it? Are all file types allowed? Does the host support CGI/PHP/other things you might need for your site? Does it let you run your own server side scripts or only those pre-installed on the server? Can you CHMOD your files and directories and does it work properly in case you need it? Can you run cron jobs? What OS does the server run under? How much space do you get? What are the limits on the bandwidth?

Furthermore, check if the host places its own ads on your pages and what they are like. Probably the worst option is the host placing its own AdSense. Sometimes they are not too savvy with their ads and you can find a way to block them or replace/cover them with your own ads or other content. But this might or might not get noticed by the host and then you'll be kicked out. Sometimes the host's ads would be just a banner of their own or better still, a harmless text link. The text link is the best as it distracts the least attention from your own site and can be rendered almost invisible with a little help from CSS. The worst case though are the providers that do not allow you to place your own ads - there are some like that. So if you gain your income with AdSense or other affiliate ads you want to stay away from those hosts. In the directories of free hosts mentioned above you'll find references to those who have no forced ads on your pages at all - but this information seems outdated in most cases as most of those providers either switched to forcing their ads on you or stopped providing free hosting at all, some as recently as a couple months ago.

We've mentioned subdomains earlier in this article. Some of these free hosts let you have several (free) subdomains with your account. While this might seem as a good idea, better be careful with it. If one of your subdomains gets kicked out by the provider so will the rest of them. Besides, you only get a limited amount of space and bandwidth, and if your sites grow too large or start getting a lot of traffic it might cause a problem. If you're really happy with a provider and want to host many sites with them, better get several accounts with different email addresses.

As a sidenote - once you register an account with a free host be sure to start doing something with it as soon as possible. Some providers will cancel your account in case of inactivity.

To sum things up, when looking for a free host for your BH site, use your head and regular BH caution like you would in any other case, but generally expect to get less than you're promised. Sometimes advertised features are only available for paid hosting plans, but the provider "forgets" about it and lists them in the description of the free plan as well, trying to get you to sign up and then upgrade to a paid plan in despair. Also, the beauty of free hosting is in your complete anonymity, so if you're concerned about it, a good free hosting provider comes very handy.

There is a discussion about free hosting going on in the black hat Seo forum