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Free Web Services
These days, it is easy to set yourself up with email and web space. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection (in other words, the tools you are now using to view this website). The only problem is: remembering all your passwords
Free! Lists of free providers |
listservs | web storage |
web hosting | email |
redirection services | surveys | hit counters |
greeting cards
Not so free
domain registration | commercial
web hosting
Lists of free providers
- http://accusubmit.com/url.html (list of services)
- EchoEcho has a good listing of free web hosts: http://www.echoecho.com/webspace.htm
- http://www.free.com - describes and links to 278 providers of free web space
- FreeIndex.com claims to be "the ultimate source for finding webmaster and Internet related freebies. On this site you can first of all find links to a lot of freebie sites. But we also have several webmaster 'Discussion forums' and hundreds of 'User comments'." http://www.freeindex.com/
- http://www.freelinks.org/url1.htm (list of services)
- See http://www.freewebspace.net/ for a list of free web space providers (free personal AND business space too).
These sites compare free and fee-based web hosting services:
- .
EchoEcho compares web hosts here: http://www.echoecho.com/webspace01.htm - http://www.hostsearch.com/
- http://www.webhostdir.com/hostsearch/default.asp
- http://www.tophosts.com/
- http://www.findahost.com/
- http://www.hostfinders.com/
Steve Schackne has a "Web World" page which lists web hosting resources at: http://www.schackne.com/Web.htm
Does the idea of a virtual slave appeal? Not sure what's here - there has to be a catch: "Yep, it's Tons of Free Stuff, and it's all new. A great new design, but all the great free stuff remains. Just select the stuff you want out of the categories, and you'll be on your way to Tons of Free Stuff!" at http://tofs.virtualave.net/
Start a discussion group or user group list, free
- Cool List: http://www.coollist.com
- Delphi – http://www.delphi.com for threaded discussion lists; more information here
- eCircles – http://www.ecircles.com - has discussion boards (which can be sent as email or kept as boards) and a lot of other tools including text chat, photo albums and space to upload other types of file. Unfortunately it is rather addy.
- E-groups: http://www.egroups.com - as of early 2001 http://www.yahoogroups.com -Web interface allows recipients to set mail to normal, digest, or nomail (read it on the website). Mail can be accessed by thread, authors' postings can be found by getting to their profiles, and all urls mentioned in last 5000 emails are presented in a hot-linked list. You can chat with other group members. Email has ads in footer, can be turned off for a fee. Sergio at the help desk answers email right away.
- www.ezboard.com to create your own fora
- Listbot: http://www.listbot.com
- One List: http://www.onelist.com - became part of egroups in the year 2000 before the Yahoo! takeover
- Topica - http://www.topica.com/
- WebApps: http://server.com/WebApps will set up a discussion group for you (or mailing list, form, guestbook, or calendar). It's free with a single banner ad, or $95 per year without the ad.
- Wimba – http://www.wimba.com lets you set up a threaded discussion list of voice files which participants record through an intuitive interface when they want to add to the discussion (Feb 2001) More information here
http://www.beitberl.ac.il/~jean/listserv.htm has tips posted by Jean Vermel on opening a listserv.
Kathryn Sucher advises, in a 15 Jul 2000 posting to Neteach-l: “Many ISPs will support the perl or cgi script that a message board requires. If you're already paying for an ISP, you might inquire whether you can run a script. You may be able to! If so, your ISP may have some free (and ad-free) scripts available to you. (I'm with Hispeed.com and they offer a free wwwboard, for example.) If your ISP does host cgi or perl scripts but they don't have a message board script, here's a free one from TESOL (also with no ads): http://www.tesol.net/scripts/Web-B-Mail/index.html . TESOL also provides other scripts to educators, such as virtual voting booth (Votsie), a crossword-maker, and form-mail, etc.Check it out: http://www.tesol.net/scripts/index.html.
The hitch in all of this is that you may need help in installing the script. I was very successful contacting a free-lance cgi-script-installer/programmer (now there's a job!) that I found at: http://www.cgi-resources.com/ His service cost me $40, but now I can run a virtual voting booth for the rest of my life: free and ad-free! I think it's worth it, and I'm happy to read on this list posts from others who share my concern for protecting our students from ads while they are studying!” <Kathryn Sucher granted permission to quote this; Feb 15, 2001>
Get a disk drive in the sky
- Egroups / Yahoogroups – http://www/yahoogroups.com - 20 meg free vault storage (Feb 2001)
- http://www.freediskspace.com/Index.asp - gives you 300MB if you answer some questions (smaller amount if you don't)
- http://www.freedrive.com (20 megabytes free storage)
- Homestead Infinite free space accessible from a free web site http://homestead.com/LoggedIn.html
- Murl - http://murl.com/welcome/
- http://www.xdrive.com/ - as of April 2001, no longer free, about $5 a month for 25MB of storage. Online hard drive that lets you store and retrieve your files from any Web browser. X:drive offers a unique desktop application that looks and functions just like any other drive on your computer. Using this feature, you can drag, drop, and edit files using the standard Windows Explorer or the My Computer interface.
- http://xoom.com/ claims 500 Megs of Free Online Storage
Free home page space is available from:
Note: Space allocations listed below were for the most part checked in 2001, are probably out of date, most likely increased in most cases ... impossible to keep up with, so use what follows as rule of thumb only, and I'd appreciate knowing about any erroneous information (Vance) ... There are more lists of hosting services here.
- Angelfire: http://www.angelfire.com (5 megabytes free; extensive graphics collection)
- CommunityZero.com – http://www.communityzero.com
- Crecon: http://www.crecon.com (not accepting new applicants as of Nov 15, 1998)
- Crosswinds: http://www.crosswinds.net "works ok, but their server can be veeery slow, and I wouldn't recommend them if you need speed. CrossWinds is free and there are no popup windows, navigation bars or banners whatsoever." Roberto Perez, 19 Sep 1999 on TESLCA-L.
- Forfree: http://www.forfree.at (5 megabytes free)
- Freeserver.com was cited in Nov 2004 on the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EVO_2005/ list as being very similar to Geocities (except maybe not free! :-0)
- Geocities: http://www.geocities.com/ (11 megabytes free; allows only two levels of subdirectories; html upload) - Now that Geocities has joined with Yahoo!, there is ftp upload too. See a PowerPoint >> html presentation on setting up a web site at Geocities.
- HealthBlast! (12 megabytes; free hosting): http://members.healthblast.com/
- Homestead: http://www.homestead.com/ (16 megabytes free as of Feb 2001; PC Magazine Editor's Choice April 6, 1999, p.150 - due to easy yet powerful wysiwyg editor, "special features such as a chat room that you can plug right into your page.")
- Homework Heaven (http://www.homeworkheaven.com) plans to begin hosting the Web sites of 3 mbytes each of 10,000 U.S. schools, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The offer coincides with Homework Heaven's public release as a Yahoo-like collection of more than 150,000 educational resource links covering 1,700 school subjects studied from kindergarten through graduate school. Access is free and the financial model is for advertising and commerce links.
- MyFamily.com is a no charge site good for classes, according to a list poster; http://www.myfamily.com
- Prohosting: http://www.free.prohosting.com/ - Unsightly imbedded ads destroy sites with frames here BUT you can prepend the command <killbanner> to your code to force popups which will hide quietly behind your browser windows. Catch is, you gotta put that command on each page. Upsides: you can run a business on their site, for free, as long as it takes up less than 15 meg and it's not illegal or pornographic; and, you get a cgi-bin and they'll run your scripts.
- TheGlobe: http://www.theglobe.com/ (12 megabytes free)
- Tripod: http://www.tripod.com (11 megabytes free; allows more than 2 levels of subdirectories; both html and ftp upload)
- Webprovider: http://www.webprovider.com - (10 meg free; html upload one file at a time; lists ftp but I couldn't get it to work) - This site can help you set up a dot.com address (for the usual registration and annual fees) and will host it for free.
- Xoom: http://www.xoom.com (11 megabytes free; ftp upload)
As a service to the ELT community, TEFL Professional Network will provide free hosting to TESOL/IATEFL and other convention presenters and authors. Maximum space per individual is 5mb. Papers will be located at http://papers.tefl.com/your_name. (According to a 13 Feb 2001, Neteach-l posting)
This came unsolicited in my email from: Emirates Cyber Community <surfin@dimensional.com>: "Get a free web site for you personal usage at: http://www.atrej.net. This offer is only for personal/individual usage."
Redirection Services
Got unwieldy url addresses from signing up with the above services? Redirect your url to something more mnemonic
· http://www.come.to/v3home.asp
And, not a redirection service, but a bookmark system: http://www.netword.com
· See more information on Networds at this website
A way to keep an apparently static Web presence
"Free Dynamic DNS is a service provided by Dynamic DNS Network Services, aimed at ISP users who would like to have a static IP, but their ISP simply does not offer this service, or charges an exorbitant amount for it, possibly in excess of $200/month. It allows users to alias their dynamic IP to a static hostname, hosted at dyndns.org. Please see the news page for important service information. Free DynDNS is now in a full public release stage." http://www.dyndns.org/freedyn/
Surveys
- Set up a web survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/
Hit counters
The Fast Counter at the following address is (or was) free: http://more.bcentral.com/fastcounter/
Free Email
Free email is available from most of the above providers and from:
· Hotmail - http://www.hotmail.com
· Excite - http://www.mailexcite.com
· Juno - http://www.juno.com
· Mailcity - http://www.mailcity.com
· Netaddress - http://www.netaddress.com
· Pegusus Mail – http://www.pegasus.com - shows attachments separately and gives you a choice about what to do with them (including save without opening)
· Rocketmail - http://www.rocketmail.com
· RocketTalk is a free service that allows you to send voice messages over the Internet to anyone else with RocketTalk or an Email account. Get your Free RocketTalk Account at http://www.RocketTalk.com. A disadvantage is that the service sends an executable attachment containing the player, and not everyone trusts such attachments.
· USA Net - http://www.usa.net
Email in Spanish: visit http://becarios.tsx.org, and go to "correo electronico"
Get free email encryption from http://www.hushmail.com. This service requires you and your correspondent to both be hushmail users. Your email is encrypted for travel through the Internet and unencrypted only by the recipient. The service pays for itself by delivering advertising directed at you based on your profile (not by selling information about you to 3rd parties, according to hushmail web documents). Probably all the free services operate in this way.
Find a listing of free providers of email here:
- http://www.emailaddresses.com can give you a list of providers plus services such as finding other people's email addresses
- Get Yahoo's long hot-linked list of free email providers at: http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_Services/Email_Providers/Free_Email/
Seen on the lists:
“It took me a while to figure out that the free e-mail accounts were useless for what I had in mind, because they weren't POP accounts - and so can not be used with Eudora and some other email software. Just a warning that might save someone some time”
To which a helpful colleague replied:
"Iname" at <http://www.iname.com> supports both web-based and POP e-mail services. The POP version lets you use Eudora and other familiar e-mail software, but you use it from the iname web site rather than through your ISP's mail server. ... The POP based option cots around $25 per year; not free, but still quite a bargain.
If you want you can register your domain name:
You can use:
- http://www.register.com, or reach them through http://www.GeoCities.com/SiliconValley/register.html
- InterNic http://rs.internic.net
- http://site.register.com (might be the same as www.register.com)
- http://www.webprovider.com
Web Hosting for Commercial Purposes
Get a list of hosts from http://www.webhostlist.com, or from http://thelist.internet.com/, or http://www.freewebspace.net/, or try:
- Bizland – http://www.bizland.com
- Communitech, at http://www.communitech.net
- http://www.compwebtech.com/ (US$ 99 per year, for 25 megs as of October 29, 1998)
- GeoShop, the commercial arm of Geocities, the nice folks who host this webpage, is at http://www.geocities.com/join/geoshops/ - I finally broke down and had my domain name registered and hosted at Geocities. It costs me $10-$20 a month for the service, not bad for no banner ads, increased storage space, and domain hosting.
- Stormer Hosting www.stormerhosting.com - reputably cheap, “great on service”, and offer many peripherals (shopping cart, POP email, etc.) if you require them.
Vance’s scratchpad: I’m not sure what these offer:
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For comments, suggestions, or further information
on this page Last updated: November 17, 2004 |
