Splat | WiseTome.com

With an experience that ranges around four to five years, I have tried just about all options of free online presence in different categories, even if not all the ones with in a category. These options though, as I stated earlier are suitable for personal websites. If you want to get a business website, then I strongly recommend getting a professional hosting, a domain name and a proper website setup. (See my previous introductory post - Creating Websites - to know more).

But the following choices are good, if you just want a personal online presence and do not want to spend a buck on anything other than the time you spend on the internet.

Let us look at the options available in the following different categories.

• Personal Websites – These are websites in general. The will have a handful of pages or more that may have your resume/portfolio, or information and resources on your favorite hobbies.
• Blogs - These are like diaries. The articles are posted in reverse chronological order. The visitors can leave some form of comments on your posts.
• Forums – These are basically discussion boards or bulletin boards. These websites are, in a simple sense, the descendants of mailing lists or mail groups. More than one person can post. Posts are strung in threads. Usually, the latest posted thread will be shown at the top.

These are the broad classifications of things you can have as a personal presence online. Let us break down at each of them and see what options we have available.

Personal Websites

• Geocities – This is actually one of the first places where I had a set of personal pages long back. Geocities works under Yahoo, and you can get registered with your Yahoo ID. The web address would be something like: www.geocities.com/your-Yahoo-ID. You are given 15 MB of disk space, and a bandwidth of 3 GB/month. Online page wizards/builders are provided to create your pages. You may also construct your HTML pages offline and upload them through a web interface. They do not give FTP access to the site, so those are the only options to build your web pages. They also provide a Yahoo 360 ° blogging tool – but if blogging is your only purpose, then see the Blogs section below.
• FreeWebs – another webspace provider similar to Geocities. They offer 40 MB space with 0.5 GB/month bandwidth. The web address would be something like www.freewebs.com/your-account-name. The good thing though is that you can buy a domain name and have it parked over this site. (But we are looking at free options, aren’t we?) It has its own site builders/wizards that you can use to create the web pages, or also sign up for an FTP access to the site.

There are more, but these are the two that I have tried out. You can search for “free webspace” and find more. There are even sites that let you compare between such free webspace providers.

Blogs

• WordPress.com – Their .org counterpart hosts the open-source project for the blogging engine – Wordpress. At WordPress.com they provide you with a blog setup. You do not need to worry about building pages, and just lets you focus on what you want to post. I believe they also provide you with themes for your blogs. The web address for your blogs at WordPress.com would be something like your-account.wordpress.com.
• Blogger.com – This is from the ‘big-daddy’ of the Internet – Google. Like WordPress, they offer roughly the same set of capabilities for setting up a blog and posting entries. They have a set of themes, but like with most of the Google products, their renovation cycles tend to be less frequent. Hence, you may not find as many themes as with WordPress. The web address for your blog would be something like: your-account.blogspot.com.
• LiveJournal.com – Owned by Six Apart, it is among the leading free blog service providers. You would be provided with a web address like your-account.livejournal.com. I am not very sure of the other features, as I have not actually tried them out.

As with webspace providers, there are a myriad of free blog service providers. But most of the blog service providers do not place any advertisements on your blogs as opposed to most of the free webspace providers

Forums

• InvisionFree – This may soon be called as ZetaBoards. They provide you with an advertisement supported forum. They were earlier giving it using the free version of IPB (Invision Power Board) 1.3. I used this service long back when they were using IPB 1.3. Now they are transitioning to their own forum engine and renaming themselves as ZetaBoards. You do not need to know any technicalities involved in setting up a forum, but if you intend to run a forum, you would need to understand the administrator controls of a forum. The forum address would be something like sn.invisionfree.com/your-forum-name or zn.zetaboards.com/your-forum-name (n - the server number).
  
• Forumer – This is a forum hosting service provider that lets you run a free forum on IPB 1.3 or phpBB 2. I believe this to be a advertisement or sponsor supported service. As with InvisionFree/ZetaBoards, the forum installation is automated and there is no technical knowledge required, but it does require the know-how of all forum administrator tasks. The forum address would be something like www.forumer.com/your-forum-name.

I have noticed that there are not as many free forum service providers as there are for generic webspace and blogs.

You must note that, any presence you create on these services can be volatile. They are usually supported financially by advertisements. In some cases, they also offer premium services, and a part of that revenue is spent on supporting these free services.

Also, I have not mentioned above, some of the advanced webhost providers. There are differences between webhost providers and the rest of the lot – webspace providers, blog hosting, and forum hosting. The webhost providers, gives you a higher control over your account.

Are there free webhost providers? Yes there are – though most of them are very unstable. They may close their shops any moment and this could result in you loosing your online presence. I would though, like to drop a service that I have been using for almost a year before I moved to paid hosting.

AstaHost.com – They provide you with a webhost account for no charge. It is a professional level of hosting. Presently they provide 500 MB with 5 GB bandwidth. They provide all the necessary features like databases and server side scripting. But they do ask you to stay active in their forums. Their forums can be very technical, and in such cases, it would be better if you choose their sister service, Trap17.com.

We have now covered most of the options we have in setting up an online presence with out spending any money. It would require some effort – but then, what does not?