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Free Hosting

To those of you who can't afford professional hosting, if you're lucky enough to have webspace supplied by your ISP (Internet Service Provider), then you may have the space you need already provided. Often people are given, say, 10 meg of space for their personal use included with their monthly dialup account. This has the disadvantage of making you stick with the same ISP long-term, and it's taken me years to find one of those that I'm happy with (I use arach.net.au if anyone's looking for a good provider in Perth, Western Australia).

For those people who don't have space provided as part of your ISP deal, and can't afford professional hosting, face it - nothing's really free. If you want web-space without paying for it, you're going to have to put up with ads appearing on your site. This sort of hosting is known as "freespace". You've probably seen Geocities sites - covered in pop-ups that can crash browsers, ugly watermarks on every page, etc. I prefer Bravenet because it integrates with a bunch of other tools such as hit-counters that you may want to add to your site once it's built.

Think about the username, cos I don't think you can change it. Give your new web-based email address as your email. You don't really have to fill in the rest of the details it asks you for, you can just run away at that point. Bravenet will email you a "welcome" email & I suggest keeping that on file. The user name is case-sensitive and space-sensitive, and it's easy to forget exactly what you put.

So, now you're the proud owner of sufficient webspace and a dedicated email address. You exist as a net-entity in the mysterious void of cyberspace. If you want to put up a temporary page while you build your site - or if you just want a quick and easy site, Fortunecity offers a good choice of online or offline web-builders. There are some OK backgrounds, and the instructions are pretty easy to follow. You get to stick in a few of your own pics and some favourite links. Of course, you're really limited with the structure, but if you just want a "homepage", then go for it, you don't need me anymore! Although if you want a 'proper' site with a structure you can control, I'll help you with that too.