If you are taking courses in various aspects of Web site construction, you will need to have some Web space to upload your work, make sure it works on a real server with various Web browsers, and share your work with your instructor and your fellow students. You have a number of options worth looking at here, from free to various cost levels, depending on what you want and what tradeoffs you are willing to make. There are certainly tradeoffs, because providing Web space costs real money. The company providing them has to purchase data lines to connect to the Internet, servers to store the Web pages on, salaries for staff, etc. So they need to charge you for the site, or they need to find some other way of making money off of your site, such as by putting advertising on your pages. Know what the tradeoffs are, and make the choice that works best for you. Here are some options you might want to try.
Most of us have accounts with an ISP, which you we use for dial-up access to the Internet, e-mail, etc. In most cases, your ISP account includes, as part of the monthly fee, some free Web space. Ziff-Davis provides a guide to ISPs that is worth a visit, at:
http://www.zdnet.com/products/ispuser/isp.html
Some examples:
Check with your ISP for the details. If you are paying a monthly fee for your Internet account, you probably have some free Web space, and why not take advantage of it.
Your best bet is an ISP that offers a plain vanilla Web-space that you can FTP files to. Support for CGI is a plus. Watch out for online services like AOL that want to do everything in a special way that only they can ever understand. I get a lot of reports of problems from them.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at a college or university, chances are you can get free Web space on their server. Some colleges even offer free web space to alumni or affiliates. I am a staff member at a religious college, and we offer Web space to parishes, schools, and church members, free of charge. Look for something like this, you never know what you will find.
There are a number of places offering free Web hosting. Bear in mind that there has to be some way for these places to make money, and this will impinge on what you do with your "free" site. They may place JavaScript or Banner ads on your page, they may rewrite the HTML in ways that you would not want, etc. Look before you leap, in other words. But if the price they ask you to pay is something you can live with, this is certainly a viable option.
There is an excellent summary of all of the free hosting options at:
http://personalweb.about.com/internet/personalweb/msubmenu8.htm
Among the leaders in this field are:
Each of these has its drawbacks, as well. Xoom is frequently inaccessible. Some of them place your site in frames, or rewrite your code in ways that make it less compliant with the standards, etc. If you want to go the free route, I would suggest going to that summary site at About.com and looking for some of the lesser known alternatives. One that I have heard good things about is ProHosting (http://free.prohosting.com/), but I have not used it myself.
The About.com site given above also lists a number of paid site hosts. Why would you want to pay for something you can get for free? Actually, there are several good reasons:
I found these advantages to be compelling, particularly when I discovered that the cost was pretty moderate. I have used a company called WebServePro (http://www.webservepro.com/), which I use for my own domain, as well as for several clients. I just set up an account for a client, and the total for registering the domain name, plus one year's service paid in advance, was $124. That was for 20MB of storage, CGI, and 5 POP e-mail accounts on a Linux server. If I want, I have access to MySQL databases, SSL, etc., for an additional fee, which is modest (example: $2.50 per month for a MySQL database).
I hope this helps to clarify the various hosting options available to you. If you want to discuss any of this further, please e-mail me. I'd love to hear from you.