Free Hosting Experiments

[Dehatter]

Just passing on to anyone who might find this interesting.

Over the past 8 days, I have tried to install the template on 4 free-to-host companies.

I currently am using 1and1 with excellent results. I signed up for the $11 for a year introductory package, but thought it would be fairly easy to use a free site. This turns out not to be the case. On 3 of the 4, I could not even get the template load at all, and the fourth, x10 hosting, technically is working. Realistically though it is not. My guess is that the server is just too overloaded to process all the blocks in time enough to display them. Sometimes they populate, and sometimes they don't. If anyone is using a free host, let me know because I would be interested in checking it out.

You can see the x10 page here -> http://matthewsweather.x10host.com/template/

Tom

[Jachym]

The only free hosting I have seen that can handle the database, PHP etc is Altervista, used by over 50% of Italian users, but to be honest with you, it has become a nightmare for me because it "works", but.... many things need customizations, so the average number of emails/problems of a user using Altervista is about 10 times the average number of emails from a regular user. It behaves very unexpectedly, it does not load data from certain external sources, inserts ad banners to the HTML at places where it causes problems etc.

[Jachym]

In the end, the way you have to look at this is - if the free hosting was as good as the paid, the companies offering the paid hosting probably wont last very long would they...

[Dehatter]

x10 has no issues with the php or database. Handled the imported data well too. ftp was a little slow, but got it. it just does not seem to work fast enough. I did have a problem building the forecast block (forbidden with the 404 error), but fixed it by building the config file locally and ftping it up. This is the only server that populated the meteogram and forecast from yr.No. All the other blocks installed normally. They do not seem interested in populating with external data.

Tom