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So you're taking the cheap route? If you don't mind limited support for CGI scripts, you don't want your own domain name (or you want to add it cheaply), and you're not against a little advertising, a free server is a perfectly reasonable choice. In fact, some of them offer some interesting advantages. Often, you can add a feature or two for a few bucks—such as a personalized domain name or e-commerce tools. This may be worth it, especially as your site grows.
If you have an AOL account, you automatically have access to AOL's Hometown service (http://hometown.aol.com/), which enables you to post up to 12MB of HTML, photos, and other documents. The Hometown service is available to non-AOL members as well, but you're limited to using their online tools, 1-2-3 Publish or Easy Designer, if you want to place the pages online. AOL members can use a special FTP area on the service, or they can use an external FTP application while connected to AOL to upload standard HTML documents and images.
If you use Hometown, you'll have a small banner at the top of your page that includes the Hometown logo, some buttons to encourage users to join Hometown themselves, and generally a small banner advertisement. Aside from templates and the easy-to-use publishing tools, AOL features a few small scripts for users to add to their pages for a guestbook or to receive HTML data in e-mail. There is no access to other CGIs, however, and no option to pay for the privilege of a page without ads or a unique domain name.
GeoCities (http://geocities.yahoo.com/) has been popular for years as a free option for Web publishing—since well before it came under the Yahoo! banner. Today, GeoCities still provides free, ad-supported pages, with the option of paying a premium for additional features, including domain name support.
With the basic GeoCities account, you get 15MB of storage space and access to GeoCities' Web building tools. Your domain will be http://geocities.yahoo.com/username/ and you'll have FTP access to the site, meaning you can bypass the easy-to-use tools and upload your own Web documents, images, and so forth.
The main advantage to GeoCities appears to be that you can add certain Yahoo!-powered content to your site: news, stock quotes, a Yahoo! search box, and so on. You can also select a category for your Web site, which enables Yahoo! to serve more targeted advertising. Ideally, that's an advantage for you and your user, as well as an obvious advantage for Yahoo!.
Along with the Yahoo! add-ons, you can add a guest book and a counter, and you can send HTML forms data via e-mail. Yahoo! also offers clip art, images, and games (such as video poker) you can add to your site. And the interface includes an advanced look at your site's statistics.
If you move up to premium services, you can get your own domain name, matching e-mail addresses, and even the ability to create subdomains, such as fred.fakecorp.com. Premium services aren't terribly pricey (currently starting at $9 per month) and offer the same access to the Yahoo! add-ons and so forth, without the ads.
Tripod is another free service, but this one focuses a bit more on business pages—particularly those that participate in advertising share programs, such as affiliate programs and Web rings. Join up and you get 50MB of space, although your pages will include banner ads served by Lycos. Interestingly, the ads are customizable —you can use "ad skins" to make the advertising area at the top of the page look a little more interesting, and you can choose between banner ads and pop-up ads.
Tripod enables you to focus on scripting a bit more than other free services, with a few prebuilt CGI and JavaScript scripts that you can access. In addition, the service offers a script editor, which you can use to write JavaScript or Perl scripts and add them to your pages (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 Tripod includes a script editor that you can use to create JavaScript or Perl scripts.
You can have a domain name forwarded to the site for free, as long as you pay $20 to register it yourself using Lycos' domain name registration partner. In fact, partnerships seem to abound on Tripod. You'll find links to many other Lycos services, such as Webmonkey for Web publishing tutorials, the Online Business Center for e-commerce advice, and Commission Central for developing relationships with affiliates and other advertisers.
Lycos offers a Tripod Plus service, which enables you to serve pages without ads. You can also pay to upgrade the amount of storage space for your documents and the amount of bandwidth your site can serve. At the time of this writing, prices start at $4.95 a month.
As part of a value-added service for Macintosh users, Apple offers iTools, a suite of Internet-based applications. It includes a Mac.com e-mail, an online storage area called iDisk, some Internet-based greeting cards called iCards, and HomePage, Apple's tools for Web publishing.
NOTE
As of this writing, Apple requires that you access your HomePage tool from a Mac-based browser. Logging in from a Windows version of Internet Explorer won't work.
An iTools account offers 20MB of total storage to be shared between the iDisk and the HomePage tool, and you can distribute that storage in any way you please. Apple doesn't advertise on its pages, but it does offer you prebuilt templates and wizards for putting together your Web pages in a way that tends to have a certain Apple-ified look to it. Not that that's bad; it's just true.
Figure 2 Apple's HomePage tool can be used to create pages based on professionally designed templates.
HomePage offers some interesting templates, including special pages that can turn a directory of images into a thumbnail gallery, a tool that posts QuickTime movies online for easy viewing, and a template that enables you to share files with other users over the Web.
What's more, Apple doesn't seem too uptight about bandwidth usage. So if you're a shareware author who wants to make your software available to the world, you might consider placing it on your Mac.com pages.
HomePages are found at http://homepage.mac.com/username/, and Apple doesn't let you have your own domain name. You can pay to upgrade your account, but that just gives you more storage space for the iDisk and HomePage tools.
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