:: in a small dark room ::

... inside your skull your mind/brain floats alone in a dark, quiet world ...

:: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 ::

Test Inaugural Posting

FIRST POST - PLACEHOLDER

Plan is to copy the contents of another blog over to here. Luckily it's fairly small so far, but I hope to expand it, and have found the way it's done needs improvement.
Some interesting stuff copied verbatim, complete with "adds" instead of "ads" throughout.

post id: 532873
FREE WEBSITES
Finding a free website is like trying to find a bride in a brothel.
They always say you’re the best (and biggest) they have ever had and them move on the next customer.
Lots of free web hosts go belly up as well as the bandwidth is expensive.
So, with the benefit of hindsight lets see what I have learnt out there in cyber space.

STEP ONE
Do not just find a web host and sign up.

First thing you should do is
A) Get a Domain name ($20 to $50 per year) OR
B) Go to http://my.dot.tk/ and get a freebie domain (redirection) name OR
C) Go to one of the many other free redirect services that give you a custom name. I recommend http://www.shorturl.com/ because once you have a (fake) domain name you can use it to link subdirectories as well as main directories

The name I obtained is “zardoz.2ya.com”

BUT WHY
If I advertise or submit my site to a search engine I will usually submit the main page (directory) of the web site.
http://www33.brinkster.com/zardoz1/index.htm

With the fake domain (redirection) name I now advertise or submit
http://zardoz.2ya.com/
as I have told the redirectors http://www.shorturl.com/ where to send that URL entry. The site also masks the true URL when it gets to the site.

This will lead to the exact same place in one seamless move. And I can link subdirectories too
http://www33.brinkster.com/zardoz1/notfaq/index.htm
becomes
http://zardoz.2ya.com/notfaq/index.htm

Now,….the important bit. If Brinkster goes broke. I can reload the site elsewhere (Eg Netfirms.com) and I simply log into my account at http://www.shorturl.com/ and change the redirection spot. No person will have to suffer (for long) with getting a missing page/site message.

I can load the same site on two different web hosts and if one has used all its bandwidth for the month I can switch to the other using the same trick.

PS: This shortcut is NOT a domain name. You cannot repark it. It is a redirection.

STEP TWO
Go hither http://www.free-webhosts.com/ (or another similar site) and start picking.
They have sites galore ranging in all manner of services. You need to find the package for you.

Interests: Personal, Business, Special sites for games only
Space: 1 MB to 100MB to unlimited
Forced Ads: No adds, text links, banners, popups.
Your Ads: Allowed or not
Upload: FTP, brows5er, email
Scripting: basic, PHP, SSI, FrontPage Extensions Perl etc or none
Your URL: Domain only or subdomain or both
Other Features: Bandwidth limit 500 MB/month Or less or more
POP3 Email, Web-based, and SMTP. Custom error pages. Password-protected directories. Statistics logs.
Flash allowed?

It all depends on what you want.

http://www.free-webhosts.com/ has a forum connect to it where they discuss sites and webhosts.
The Experiment
As an experiment I uploaded the exact same page on over 30 locations to see differences in both bandwidth and speed.

The following was discovered;

Sites that have popup adds can double your bandwidth when opening a page. (IMHO..popups are a bastard anyway as they spring up in your face and if you shut them you can trigger more to popup.)

Banners were second best and obviously sites that have no forced adds were the best.

Some sites are terribly slow, some are frequently offline for periods ranging from an hour per day to a full day per week.

Hotlinking…very few allow it but we shall wait and see with the new ones setting up. The Cpannel at http://realwebmasters.org allowed me to dictate what sites I could hotlink to and from.

I have successfully linked from http://www.homepage-host.uni.cc/index1.html also. It carries NO forced ads but it only offers 10meg of space


My recommendations as at today
http://www.topcities.com/
150 megs…banner adds..flash allowed
http://www.hp-h.us/
50 megs of space and unmetered bandwidth
http://www.brinkster.com/
30 megs…no adds…no flash allowed
http://www.netfirms.com/
25 megs… banner adds..flash allowed
http://www.homepage-host.uni.cc/index1.html
10megs…No adds…seem to be able to hotlink from

Labels: first, test

:: Mez 4:36 AM [+] ::
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