• Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

    Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

    Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Web Resources

http://www.parahosting.net/
  • cPanel & Fantastico
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  • Webmail (Horde & Squirrelmail)
  • Free, Paid, Reseller Hosting
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  • Running out of bandwidth? We upgrade your bandwidth to an additional 100MB every time we see an active web site using their accounts.
  • Free plans each have their own advantage, such as Tick for disk space, and Mite for bandwidth
  • 24 Hour Response Guaranteed
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  • 90% Uptime
  • Coupon Codes (25% off any paid or resller plan)

Remove this now. Ever since I sold this, it has turned into crap (no support, frequent outages, nobody cares, etc. etc.).
 
Consider changing 'freeware' to something like 'Free/Libre/Open Source Software' because the word freeware is so muddled in historical usage that everybody has different definitions for it.

Much of the 'Website Help' section's HTML is invalid - how do they teach HTML if they can't even write correct HTML?

Consider:
W3 Markup Validator
W3 CSS Validator

Maybe group browsers by rendering engine? There really isn't much point in testing with Seamonkey if you already tested in Firefox - both are Gecko-based.

Running a virtual machine might be a good idea for trying browsers that won't run natively on whatever operating system you use, but that's probably out of the scope of this topic.
 
Proboards is a really awful free forum hosting service + forum script. It's not on your server so you don't need anything for it, but it's pretty lame.
 
Uh, Freewebs can't really do anything with forums. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't give you any support for that kind of stuff. I'd recommend InvisionFree, I guess. I'm positive there's some website out there that will automatically make you a MyBB; however, I don't know if it hosts it for you or not. Probably. x3;

It's been about two years since I worked with any of that; so, again, I really don't know.
 
ok. then the qustion stands "What is the (most) perfect free host?"

I'll put it elsewhere too.
 
Are all these definately 100% free? ^^; sorry for being cautious but I do not like hidden prices within things ^^;
 
Hahahaha wow this list is woefully out of date. Maybe I should fix it one of these days, since ECM hasn't been on in months and all.

Krazoa, if it's listed under "free whatever" then it is probably free (obviously whatever's listed under "paid whatever" is not), but use your own judgment with this sort of thing. If you're suspicious, actually investigate it yourself.
 
Um, I'm going to necro resurrect jump back in here with a few useful things for making old fashioned websites in 2020.

Free Hosts

The majority of good free hosts only allow static sites. Static sites are websites which only use client-side code - that is, no SSI, no PHP, no anything other than good ol' HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Neocities - pretty much the best free web host for static sites, created with the purpose of providing a space for the revival of wacky personal sites from the nascent internet. That is to say, it's Geocities for the modern age! Comes with a command-line API for easy file uploads. Very reliable in terms of customer support and so on.

Netlify - their free plan gives you 100GB bandwidth per month, can link to a Github repository, and supports continuous deployment. You can also use the static site generator Hugo via their web-based command line, which is good for blogs (and lots of other sites too).

Render - another service similar to Netlify, with 100GB bandwidth per month on their free plan; however, it only supports static sites. It can link to Git for continuous deployment. If you want to create a blog or use a static site generator, you can use Jekyll, Gatsby or Hugo.

Github Pages - offers a free website for each Github project you have, along with one extra for personal use. You can manage your website's files and resources via a Github repository. It also supports blogging with the static site generator Jekyll.

000webhost - The only free host on this list which allows server-side code. Offers a free plan with 3GB bandwidth, 300MB disk space and access to MySQL, CPanel, and PHP (along with a bunch of other server-side technologies). However, if you don't regularly log in and/or update your website it will be archived and unaccessible to viewers.

Amazon AWS services - It's unclear whether or not they actually offer free hosting, because the small print says that the usual cost for a "free" static site is $0.50 per month; which is quite good, but not actually free. They do offer other services, such as databases, for free, however. You might find something useful so I've linked it here.

Static site generator? What?

So far I've mentioned static site generators a lot. Static site generators take your normally written content - articles, blog posts, etc - and transform them into a complete website composed of HTML pages (along with the associated CSS and Javascript files, which it doesn't touch). They are a good option if you'd like to run a blog, but you can make any kind of site you like with them - including personal webpages or Pokemon fansites! Keep in mind that they're a lot more work to set up than Wordpress or Blogger.

Go here for a list of popular static site generators. My personal favourite is Hugo.

Useful stuff

csi.js
Can't use PHP or SSI to include repeated bits of HTML (like a menu) into your site? No problem, you can do it client-side with Javascript. This useful little library provides a neat and tidy way to do just that. (it really is tiny - only 450ish bytes!)

staticman
A free comments system for static sites which uses Github/Gitlab to store and process comments. You get to host your own comments system, essentially, though it's more work than something like Disqus.

Disqus
Another popular comments system which has a free plan. Chances are you have seen or used Disqus before, but it tends to load slowly and has ads on its free version.

Hyvor Talk
Like Disqus, it is a comments system hosted by another company, but this has the bonus of not displaying ads on its free version!

Cbox
A shoutbox - essentially, a live chat which you can embed into your site for users to fool around in. It only saves the last 100 or so comments, with anything past that being deleted.

formspree.io - An email contact form that works with static sites (ie. doesn't need server side code on your part). Has a free plan.
 
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