Homeless website

[PaperTiger]

Once upon a time I had a website at members.xoom.com . It was free.
Xoom was bought by NBCi, so then I had a website at members.nbci.com . It was free.

After a week or so of failed FTPs recently, I poked around the nbci home page and found a stealthy 'message to members'. nbci will no longer offer website hosting wef Aug 1st. They have made 'arrangements' to transfer sites to homestead.com. This however, is not free.
OK, so I had a good run and although I am not entitled to any sort of service when it's free, an e-mail to all members would have been nice, don't you think ? (~15 minutes to write the code I'd say).

Anyway the point....
Anybody have suggestions for a decent free web host? I need about 80Mb and FTP. Preferably N.America, but not necesssarily.

tia

[ 29 July 2001: Message edited by: PaperTiger ]

[Blacksheep]

I'm not sure about the no right to service with free hosting, it depends on the terms under which the hosting was provided.

Once upon a time, when the internet was still mostly amateur and Netscape hadn't been invented - you used Mosaic or nothing and Archie was a state of the art search engine - there was a new startup called Look-Up.com. They intended to produce an internet directory and offered free hosting in exchange for the right to use your registration data in the directory. The space was only 2 megs but hey, there were no Java applets or frames and stuff then either. I signed up and set up my nice new website, all text and a few images for buttons and background. My twelve pages took up 1.4 megs and I was a happy new web-head. Then a competitor called Four11.com bought Look-up and merged the two directories. They sent us all a message that we weren't to worry, they would provide the free web space on the original terms. For a few years my site ran fine. Then Yahoo bought Four11 and told us they were terminating the free webspace. Like many others I replied "Fine, just delete me from your data base, I'm rescinding your right to use my details" Yahoo then agreed to retain the free space for existing users only. New registrants would have to pay and the site stayed up for another year. Finally Yahoo sent a message that due to lack of interest they were shutting down the directory altogether and closing the sites. They still sell my details to advertisers for profit though, and it seems I can't stop them. B*st*rds! (They also bought Rocketmail and absorbed that too although the address still works. I wonder how long that will last?)

Just be forewarned. Free hosting services make their money by selling your details to advertisers, so use a Hotmail address to register, then check the mail and delete without reading once a week to keep it open. The only satisfactory way to be sure of getting a permanent website is to use one of your obsolete but still operational PCs as a server and connect it to the web. Unless your site is as good as this one; then you're into a very expensive hobby.

P.S. Where can I buy duct tape that will blend in with the wallpaper?

**********************************
Through difficulties to the cinema

[PaperTiger]

Yes I've always used a stealth address to register and as the 'mailto:'. Must say I don't get masses of junk - 3 or 4 a day.
Anyway having spent about 15 hours FTP time retrieving my site from NBCi (ptooey) my appetite for loading it all back somewhere else has waned somewhat. Maybe in the winter...