Finding a free home on the Web

The dot-com meltdown has put some free home-page companies out of business. Here's a look at three survivors and how easy it is to set up a personal page on them.

By JULES ALLEN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 8, 2001

A lot of people staked out virtual homesteads in recent years. They took advantage of free space available to put up personal Web pages that reflected their interests, such as family photos.

But as the dot-com meltdown unfolded, many personal Web pages that once enjoyed a free ride online had to find new homes because their hosts went out of business or started charging fees as the companies found that banner ads didn't pay the bills.

It may have left an impression that the free Web site was a dead Net idea. It's not, but you're likely to find more strings attached to these deals.

There has always been some small print to go with "free Web site!" offers.

Some businesses offered additional services that cost money. Others used free services as a loss leader: They would get you in the door with a cutdown version of what they really wanted you to buy, such as a whizzy, must-have feature for a few dollars a month. Until you built most of your site, this catch wouldn't be apparent.

Most free or low-cost Web sites are offered only for personal use and supported by the provider's advertising. The providers usually prohibit conducting business on the site and some limit the amount of data that can be stored for free, effectively restricting the number of "pages" that can be included and the number of photos and graphics. Most of the large, popular ones, however, give you plenty of space to play.

Once you create your personal Web site, you can give out its address so family and friends can check out your family journal or information about your favorite hobby.

As Web hosts for the masses go out of business or begin charging, competitors are making a pitch for Web page refugees.

For example, Tripod greets you with a popup ad on its home page asking if your hosting provider is closing down or moving to a pay-for-play business.

People looking for new Web homes will find two basic kinds offered by hosting providers: a soft and cuddly way to create simple pages that requires almost no technical knowledge, and a hard-core techie method that requires some experience with HTML editors and Internet file transfer programs.

Because the services are free, the chances of getting any real, live help from the provider are virtually nil. So either become the best chum of some tech person or prepare for a potentially frustrating learning curve by yourself.

America Online, the biggest Internet service provider, offers very limited free Web pages to its 31-million members. You can find its offerings by signing on and going to keyword "Hometown."

To get an idea of the current state of other free hosting providers, I chose three of the largest and created some simple sites. They all offer many of the same features, so it's the little things that make a difference:

Geocities (www.GeoCities.com): The registration process requires you to create a Yahoo ID. That means that in addition to Web hosting, you'll have access to free e-mail, a news portal and all the goodies that go along with using Yahoo, one of the industry giants and the owner of Geocities. If you already have a Yahoo ID, the process is very zippy.

Geocities' simplest way to create a Web page is a predesigned template. You pick one from a large selection, answer a few questions and give the page a name. You can follow directions to add additional text and your own photos or graphics.

It's mostly a nice experience for the novice, except for when things aren't working on the Yahoo servers.

I got the occasional message that said, "Could not connect to JRun Connector Proxy, please contact the system administrator for this Web site." That's a terse way of handling an error and not up to the usual Yahoo standards of usability.

If you want something snazzier and less prefab, try Page Builder. It's more like a word processor. If you've ever used Microsoft's Front Page software to create a Web page, you should feel at home, but you can work your way through it without that experience. Page Builder allows you to get wild and crazy with font formatting, backgrounds and sounds. It also gives you the option to tie in Yahoo news headlines or create feedback forms.

Dire warnings state that it has been tested only with the Windows operating system. If you've got a Mac, it might not work. And your browser must support Java applets for Page Builder to be successful.

Tripod (www.Tripod.com): Lycos owns the Tripod service and seems to take a midpoint between Yahoo's two offerings.

You can pick either a preformatted template or a blank canvas. This tool doesn't use Java applets like Yahoo. Instead, it acts just like a regular Web page. You create and change content by clicking on little edit buttons next to the objects you have control over.

I'd consider this a better service for those who have non-Windows computers such as Macs and ones that run Linux. Yahoo continues to become more Windows-centric, so this is a welcome find.

Tripod has what it calls Web Gems, which are the answer to Geocities' proprietary content. Feature for feature, the two services offer pretty much the same goodies.

HyperMart (www.HyperMart.com): Those with more advanced computer skills might want to consider a provider such as HyperMart. Its page-building tools are weak compared with Geocities and Tripod, but that doesn't seem to be its focus anyway. It's made for those who want to open up the hood and fiddle with the inner workings of a Web site.

No matter what your precocious kids might have you believe, HTML isn't really a programming language. You can't make it do anything other than display information. Enter HyperMart: It oozes geek appeal by allowing you to create your own programs on the server using Perl (www.Perl.com) or PHP (www.php.net). Salty old Web types will be pleased at their ability to write computer code on HyperMart's servers.

Like Geocities and unlike Tripod, HyperMart allows you to use File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, to connect and upload content. For advanced users, this is preferable to a browser-based way to manage files. With the power comes the cost of having to know how FTP programs operate. Most, thankfully, are drag-and-drop, but you can get yourself into trouble if you're not 100 percent sure of what you are doing.

Many free and shareware FTP programs are available on just about every computer platform that can sustain an Internet connection.

Your favorite search engine will, no doubt, help you find one. Here are a few FTP programs I've come across: Windows users might enjoy CuteFTP (www.CuteFTP.com) or WS FTP (www.ipswitch.com). Mac users could do a lot worse than my personal favorite, Transmit (www.panic.com/transmit/).

Signing up for all three of the Web hosting services was easy, but I wondered why they all wanted my date of birth. Like my Social Security number, it's not something that I readily share over the Internet. However, I have an "Internet birthday," which I use every time some site asks for the day I started putting my mother through the most miserable years of her life.

HyperMart also wants a credit card, even if you choose the free account. Apparently this is to cover expenses just in case you go over your disk space or monthly data transfer limit.

Your visitors will be exposed to advertising when they visit your site on any of these choices, which is understandable since the folks providing you free real estate on the Web have to pay their bills. Geocities is semi-obtrusive and places ads on your pages. Lycos takes the pop-up route, and a new browser window spawns each time you look at a page. HyperMart is a full frontal assault of multiple popping, flashing banner ads.

But choosing a provider and getting your site up are not your only concerns. Today's free hosting provider might shut down tomorrow, or turn into an overpriced turkey that's holding your data hostage. Keeping good, regular backups of what you place on the site is your ticket out of bondage.

Your Web browser has a "save-as" function that you can use to save copies of your pages on your hard drive. What it saves, though, is just HTML. You'll need to click on each of the images on the page and save them, too. And if you have background images or sounds, you'll have to figure out how you're going to download them.

With this in mind, perhaps the easiest way to move your site between providers is to master an FTP program. If you've ever copied files around on your hard disk, you're halfway there. All modern FTP programs allow you to drag and drop files between the remote server and your local disk so making backups is a breeze.

Let's say your hosting provider went out of business at 8 a.m. How would that affect you? Family photos would probably be the most serious loss for the average person, so make sure that the Web site does not contain your only copy. Another tip for moving from one provider to another is to avoid provider-specific features.

For instance, Yahoo offers widgets such as page counters that tell the visitor how many times a page has been viewed. Or a birthday countdown gadget. While your words and images can be moved around, none of these proprietary features can be seamlessly picked up and moved over to a non-Yahoo server.

Web terms

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is a set of codes that describe how a Web page should be displayed. Web browser software interprets each page that is returned from a Web server.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol is a way to move files between Internet-connected computers. Today's FTP programs hide almost all of the techno mumbo jumbo that you had to be conversant with just a few years ago.

Java: This computer language originally started life as a way to get home appliances to talk to each other. It took off when Netscape tied it into its Web browser. Everybody was amazed when it added animation to otherwise static HTML pages. Java applets (or little applications) are a form of Java that allows programs to be downloaded from a Web site and to be run in a secure fashion on your computer.

Perl: Perl is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. It's a programming language that excels at text manipulation and, therefore, is very popular for creating dynamic Web pages that are sent to your browser. Perl is a complex beast and doesn't make an ideal first computer language. Just don't spell it "pearl" or the geeks will be on to you in a flash.

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