LIMITED TIME OFFER - and Only from Filetonic.com!
CLICK HERE NOW for the Globat GX01 Package - Only $4.44/mo for Unlimited Bandwidth/Storage
Compare Host Price for Basic Package
Globat $4.44/mo
LunarPages $6.95/mo
HostMonster $6.95/mo
HostGator $4.95/mo
BlueHost $6.95/mo
StartLogic $4.95/mo
GoDaddy $4.29/mo
Yahoo! Geocities Free Hosting: Pain or Pleasure?
Free hosting from pretty much any site is going to have some things in common. For one thing, the help center is pretty much nonexistant. For another, the host will load your site with unwanted advertisements. And for a third thing, actually creating the pages can be challenging, to say the least.
Yahoo! Geocities has all these things in spades. Their free hosting service is quite well known, and they do allow you to use either their SiteBuilder, your own WYSIWYG editor, or your own hand coded files to create your webpages. But there the convenience pretty much ends, especially if you’re working from an older, slower computer, with a dialup connection.
I started out with Geocities when I was first learning to put together a website. It was fairly easy to understand, with a little trial and error. And SiteBuilder was fun to play with. But the problems just kept coming; SiteBuilder would freeze up, leaving me with no way to save my work. And waiting for it to load was painfully slow. (DSL lines shouldn’t have this problem, but SiteBuilder is not meant to be used on a dialup line; if you don’t use some sort of high-speed internet, consider yourself warned. You can make yourself a pot of coffee, and sometimes even drink it, while you’re waiting for the program to load.)
Uploading HTML text files, on the other hand, has its own set of problems. Uploading the files was surprisingly fast (again, remember, I was working with dialup; ten minutes or more is fast, on dialup), but once they were up, they had a nasty habit of not looking the way they had before they were uploaded–which meant revisions to the coding and uploading them all over again, hoping that this time they would come out looking right.
And in the end, whether you used SiteBuilder (or your own WYSIWYG editor) or hand coded files, you still end up with a typical free hosting site. Not that other sites don’t have ads, limited help, and challenging design problems, but Geocities seems to have more problems than most.
