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Free Web Hosting Area

by tnolet on 1/27/25, 9:53 AM with 37 comments

  • by jjbinx007 on 1/27/25, 10:58 AM

    I just tried to create an account and got this error:

    "Can't connect to newserv.freewha.com:443 (hostname verification failed) hostname verification failed at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/LWP/Protocol/http.pm line 50."

    This reminds me of the days of Tripod and Geocities, and when ISPs gave you webspace and usenet access as part of the package. They also gave you their own email service which meant it was a real pain if you changed ISPs - my mother-in-law is still with btinternet because she's worried about losing her email address if she switches.

  • by tnolet on 1/27/25, 11:22 AM

    I just posted this as I noticed my handyman was hosting his site there. I felt very very nostalgic. The text, the buttons, everything. The mention they will "soon have SSL", unmetered traffic. Just good old early 2000s web.

  • by pogue on 1/27/25, 11:06 AM

    Neocities might be a better option for those that are looking for something like this

    https://neocities.org/

  • by hexage1814 on 1/27/25, 12:22 PM

    I notice that all most of these free hosts are pretty picky as far flagging/banning your account. And I'm not even saying sending a gazillion requests or doing something outlandish. I'm talking about sending 500 or 1000 requests a day to download small html files.

    It is the sorta of thing I never had a problem using Neocities for small projects.

  • by OuterVale on 1/27/25, 12:41 PM

    In the same realm of cheap hosting: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

  • by lovegrenoble on 1/27/25, 12:00 PM

    >> no ads for new sites

    And when the site gets old? Then the ads will appear?

  • by beardyw on 1/27/25, 11:52 AM

    > More features will be soon available (e.g. SSL support -->https://)

  • by lacoolj on 1/27/25, 12:00 PM

    between the broken english and 1999 feel of this geocities alternative, i can't imagine this as anything other than a place for someone to begin their web career at 9 years old

  • by Bengalilol on 1/27/25, 1:37 PM

    I was puzzled by the invitation to register domain names through ProtonHosting. I didn’t look into it much, but it seems like ProtonHosting is linked to Betan, a company I can’t find much information about. Going up the nodes, I found that everything is done under the Newfold Digital group (afaik).

  • by pg5 on 1/27/25, 12:51 PM

    Don't know why Adsense has a format that takes up a third of phone screens with position:fixed

  • by Jotalea on 1/27/25, 6:48 PM

    I've used this service a while ago, it was really messy, but somehow dealing with it and getting it to work was fun (or I just like to suffer).

    It has a "retro" feel that, even if I didn't get to experience, feels nice.

  • by qudat on 1/27/25, 12:57 PM

    This is very cool! I wonder how they can afford to maintain a service like this for free especially since you can run php.

    I’m running a static site hosting service and even with that comes challenges with usage and scale.

  • by cr125rider on 1/28/25, 12:21 AM

    What a great service. Younger me would have killed for something like this. I started my whole dev career thanks to ones like this back in the day. Good on these folks.

  • by lazylizard on 1/27/25, 2:35 PM

    oracle gives 4 cores 24gb ram 200gb disk and 10tb egress free?

    gcp gives 1 core, 1gb ram n 1gb bandwidth?

    azurewebsites.net is free forever? php only no db?

    fly.io supposedly 3 x 256mb instances free?

  • by hronak on 1/27/25, 12:10 PM

    > Buying your domain from our domain registration site https://www.protonhosting.com will be as well a real help. We have good prices for almost all domains and regularly we run promos when you can register your domain for just few dollars.

    The linked domain [1] redirects to [2] which is a reseller of Endurance International Group. Prices are not cheap for the domains to be honest.

    [1] - https://www.protonhosting.com

    [2] - https://protonhosting.supersite2.myorderbox.com/

  • by lazylizard on 1/27/25, 2:31 PM

    5gb infinityfree

    1gb awardspace

    1gb zettahost

    1gb googiehost

    512mb x10

    5gb profreehost

    1gb freehosting

    250mb freehostia

  • by notpushkin on 1/27/25, 11:12 AM

    > Is there a way to create subdomains for my domain?

    > Go to the same form for domain registration (on the same server) and register subdomain.domain.com, without www in front.

    Will it check that you actually own the domain you’re getting the subdomain for first?

  • by danielspace23 on 1/27/25, 4:37 PM

    I remember trying it out several years ago, when I was experimenting with hosting my website for the first times. The UX was terrible just as it is now, and I ended up never actually using it for much.

    I then went on to try https://biz.nf, and I think they belong to the same category - free web hosting, provided by actual profit-driven corporations as opposed to orgs/collectives such as NeoCities, which seems to be stuck in time. Both continue to work in 2025, neither offers free HTTPS (which means those sites won't even open by default on most modern browsers), not much is known on who runs them, and neither has upgraded their graphics in (tens of?) years. But they do work.

    I still have my Biz.NF account. I don't actually use it - the lack of SSL is a deal breaker for any potential serious use one might have - but I log into it from time to time, when I'm feeling nostalgic. There's something so charming about it, it's hard to explain. It might be the early 2000s web design aesthetic, with the cartoonish clip-art icons, heavy shadows and gradient backgrounds. Or it might be the memory of those times, when I thought that anything I could think of, I could develop, with my silly little free web hosting account.

    I can't convince myself on how these sites still exist. Sure, they provide abysmal specs for the free tier, and they're quick to ban everything that they think is abuse. But they have staff, including the support agent who kindly explained to 13y/o me that the free tier doesn't allow your PHP scripts to fetch external resources, and the people taking care of the actual servers, providing support for the latest PHP versions, and more.

    I'm fully convinced that these hosts will not be here in 10 years. It simply can't work. Biz.NF has paid services, but they're overpriced when compared to almost everything else. You can't convince me they're much profitable. Even their free hosting offerings are outdated - most of the comments here are talking about better alternatives. Biz.NF has recently discontinued the free website builder, without announcing any replacement. FreeWHA runs entirely on outdated software, and most features have been "coming soon" since before 2017.

    They're probably the sites that best allow people to experience the "dead mall vibe" on the Internet (alongside Decentraland, for Folding Ideas fans). To me they feel like they're just going by inertia, surviving off of a handful of paid subscribers, some of which have probably forgotten they're subscribed at all.

    At some point, some random guy is going to decide they can't be bothered to keep the lights on anymore - as little as that electricity bill might cost - and that will be the end for this corner of web history. And just like when I read in the news that the mall where I used to go as a child was closing down, I'm going to be sad when I receive the email of Biz.NF's end of service.