by Kewoni Berkley

Created on: October 23, 2008   Last Updated: October 30, 2009

If you are like me then you want free web hosting that allows you to have a cool domain name and reasonable storage space for all your pictures, videos and other files. Finding such a host is almost near impossible as most hosts will give you a trial of their service or a demo which force annoying ads onto your web pages. Also, they limit the availability of resources and put restrictions on certain actions such as editing the HTML code of the website.

I'm guessing if you're reading this article though you may already know this and all you want is answers. Well just like you, I was having quite a time finding such a host. I tried them all, from Google sites, Bravenet , Highpowersites, Freewebs and even blogs like BlogSpot, Wordpress, Blogger.

Like they say, you never know what you got till it's gone. Of all the listed above, Freewebs was treating me the best; they gave me some really great templates to choose from plus a cool "dot webs" sub domain. What made me go looking elsewhere however were the forced ads that appeared on every single webpage. I eventually found a loop hole to get around this.

Freewebs gives you 50MB of storage space and they allow you to upload almost anything that you can fit. So what I did was edit each page (except the homepage) with an html editor and removed the ads, replaced them with my own ads then uploaded them onto the freewebs server. My links from the homepage would obviously go to these pages. You can see this in action at http://www.berkleysbookstore.webs.com

Later I found out that even the homepage of the website can be manipulated in the same way. Upload your desired homepage as "index.htm" to the freewebs server and this file will be shown when your domain is called on. So in this way you virtually have total control over the content of your website. An example of this is one of my own website found at http://www.xeebo.webs.com/. Please note that all the ads placed on the web pages were specifically placed there by me and were not forced by freewebs.

So if you are looking for free web hosting, my recommendation is freewebs.com. If freewebs does not take your fancy however, you can go with bravenet or google, I haven't tried them but I also heard yahoo geocities is a good pick.

I must commend freewebs on their great work hosting millions of websites and giving us such freedom and control over our content. Keep it up freewebs and you'll see an even brighter future.

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