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♦ Is advertising forced on you? Many free hosting services make money by forcing advertisements on your pages. This practice can create a problem because you might not always want to associate your page with the company being advertised. (A page for a day care center probably should not have advertisements for dating services, for example.)

♦ Which scripting languages (if any) are supported? Look for PHP support.

♦ Does the host offer prebuilt scripts? Many hosts offer a series of prebuilt and preinstalled scripts. These can often include content management systems, message boards, and other extremely useful tools. If you know that you’re going to need Moodle, for example (a course management tool for teachers), you can look for hosting services that have it built in. (If a tool you want isn’t there, make sure you have FTP access so you can install it yourself.)

♦ Does the host provide access to a database? Is phpMyAdmin support provided? How many databases do you get? What is the size limit?

♦ What sort of Control Panel does the service provide? Does it allow easy access to all the features you need?

♦ What type of file management is used? For example, determine how you upload files to the system. Most services use browser-based uploading. This system is fine for small projects, but it’s quite inconvenient if you have a large number of files you want to transfer. Look for FTP support to handle this.

♦ Does the host have an inactivity policy? Many free hosting services automatically shut down your site if you don’t do anything with it (usually after 30 to 90 days of inactivity). Be sure you know about this policy.

♦ Do you have assurances that the server will remain online? Are backups available? What sort of support is available? Note that these services are much more likely on a paid server.

♦ How easily can you upgrade if you want? Does a particular hosting plan meet your needs without being too expensive?

♦ Does the service offer you a subdomain, and can you register your own? You may also want to redirect a domain that you didn’t get through the service. (See the section “Naming Your Site,” later in this chapter, for information on domain names.)

♦ What kind of support is available? Most hosting services have some kind of support mechanism with e-mail or ticket systems. Some hosts offer live chat, and some have telephone support. Talking to a real human in real time can be extremely helpful, and this is often worth paying for.

Connecting to a hosting service

The sample pages for this book are hosted on Freehostia.com, an excellent, free hosting service. You can find many great hosting services, but the rest of the examples in this chapter use Freehostia. I chose this service for the examples because

♦ Its free account is terrific. At the time of this writing, the features of the free account at Freehostia are as good as they are at many paid accounts.

♦ The pages have no forced advertising. Freehostia doesn’t place any ads on your pages (a major selling point for me).

♦ PHP, phpMyAdmin, and MySQL are supported — all on the free account. Often, you have to upgrade to a paid service to get these features.

♦ You get enough space to start with. The free account comes with 250MB of space. This amount is fine for ordinary Web pages, PHP, and database needs. You need more, though, if you do a lot of image or video hosting.

♦ You can have a subdomain for free. Even if your site doesn’t have a domain name, you can choose a subdomain so that your site has a recognizable address, like http://myStuff.freehostia.com.

♦ It has a good list of script installers. It comes with a nice batch of scripts that you can install effortlessly.

♦ The upgrade policy is reasonable. Freehostia makes money on commercial Web hosting. It offers an excellent free service that, ideally, gets you hooked so that you then upgrade to a commercial plan. It has a number of good upgrade packages for various sizes of businesses.

♦ You get a nice batch of extras. The