100 Webspace, has two “free” hosting plans. I say “free” because if you don’t want banners on your site, you have to pay 99 cents a year. Which is not really that bad, but other host are giving free hosting without banners for free. A good design will allow you to integrate a banner into the page without it being as noticeable. Also, if the banner is small as they leave you to believe then it shouldn’t take up that much space on the site.

Here is what you get with 100 Webspace’s plan. You have a 100 Mb disk space, and 3 GB of monthly bandwidth. The plan also includes five sub-domains, one FTP account, three POP3 email accounts, and aliases, one MySQL database with 5 megs of storage, and over 3400 Perl modules. Since they do offer phpMyAdmin, I would guess that they do support PHP, and since they offer Perl modules it should be safe to say they also support Perl. Most other free hosting sites offer more in each of these categories. They do provide you with information about what type of software they use on the servers which is nice. They use a Linux based server, they did not list the flavor of Linux, with Apache. This is one of the most popular combinations for a web host today, so that is not really a big surpise.

What caught my eye the most is that they guarantee a six hour response time. From dealing with hosts in the past, I have noticed that most response times are around 24 hours, even with paid hosting. So a six hour response time is great, especially since it is free hosting. Don’t expect to call someone though with their support system, it is all ticket based. When looking at information about their support, they first suggest that you use CPanel’s help guide, video tutorial, use their Help Center, or ticketing system. They also suggest for a back up, you can use their forums for support issues also.

If you want a site that you can practice learning some coding, then this maybe the perfect plan for you. If you are looking to host a forum, or blog, then you may want to think twice about 100 Webspace, it just depends on how popular your site is.

From the looks of the features on Webhost Planet’s site plans page, it seems like they offer a lot of features. You get 20GB of bandwidth a month, and 5GB of disk space. Along with this you also get 3 MySQL database. One of the features that they provide that most other free hosts don’t provide is cron job support. This is great if you have a script you need to run every day. You also get Front Page Extensions, which seem to be something that most web hosting companies are moving away from, since a lot of people can now code websites by hand. With Webhost Planet, you can also get log files and site stats, this will help determine what is actually doing good on your site, and where it’ss not doing so well. There is a conflict in their information about ads. They say that there are no forced ads, but they also say that there are placed ads on the site. I don’t know if this means that they don’t force you to place ads on the site, but you have a banner that you can’t remove or a link in the site footer that links back to their homepage.

Vlexo free hosting consist of three different plans, named Alpha, Platinum, and Titanium, with Titanium being the plan with the most features. Each plan comes with Cpanel 11, Fantastico, PHP 5, Perl/CGI, Ruby on Rails, and traffic stats. It is interesting that they provide Ruby on Rails, and is one of the few free hosting sites that I have seen that supports this language.

Profuse hosting not only offers a single free hosting plan, but has three different plans to choose from. This is a first that I have seen for any free hosting site. All three plans have something different to offer. Before we get into what is different about the plans, lets cover what they have in common.

All plans offer either PostgreSQL or MySQL database, which is different, most hosting companies offer only one type of database. This is usually MySQL. Each plan also allows for PHP 4.3.11, and Perl 5.8.4. Python is also included on all plans. All have PHPMyAdmin, cPanel, and are hosted on a Linux server. That is where the similarities end.

Webmaster-Networks has a decent free hosting plan. With the hosting plan you get 100 Mb of space, and a one gigabyte bandwidth limit. For a personal site, this is well more than enough to coverage. You also get two MySQL databases, with the databases you could host a blog and a small forum if you wanted or needed to do so. You can access your email any where you have Internet access since Webmaster-Networks uses Webmail to provide you with the three free mail accounts you receive. Other features that you get when signing up are FTP accounts, two sub-domains, and Awstats. Webmaster-Networks does not tell you how many FTP accounts you get on the page about their free hosting. Awstats, if you have not heard of them, is a very free popular stat program that most larger websites use. If you take part in Webmaster-Networks’ affiliated program they state that they give you additional features but they do not say what those features are. The link on the their page just says you are rewarded with a prize.