iTriss.com states that they are the leading provider of free personal web site hosting. They also say that they are super reliable and totally free without ads. iTriss, from here doesn’t give a lot of information about what they provide on their free accounts. They do tell you that the account comes with PHP, multipled MySQL databases, five GB of space, and Fifty GB of bandwidth. Also, they say that more comes with their free package, but they don’t list what the “more” includes. They do inform you that their servers are monitored 24 hours a day, and state that they use servers with quad cores and eight Gigs of RAM. This is pretty much useless information, unless you have an issue with your site running slow. Seems like they are throwing potential customers a bone, and trying to flex their virtual muscles to make them look better. iTriss does have what looks like an in depth FAQs section on what you can do with a free account, but it again doesn’t give a full list of what they support or don’t support. For example, one of the FAQs ask about CURL support. The answer is short, you get partial CURL support, but with the Premium Plans you have full CURL support. After scanning the FAQs, you will notice that the FAQs isn’t as in depth as it looks, just seems like a way to get you to update their Premium Plan. Another thing that iTriss does that is different is that you have to sign up in their forum to get a registration code. Without this code, they state that your site will be deleted from their servers within 30 days.

With the lack of information on what they actually provide, you may want to pass on using iTriss. Some of the things they provide seems nice for a free site, but it seems that they have a limited amount of features, and try to force you to use one of their Premium Plans, if you want one of those features.

What is there to say about HyperPHP.com? Well when just looking over the free account information, there are a few things that caught my eye. There is 350 MB disk space, which seems small compared to some free hosting sites that have been presented in the past. They also have a 15 GB of monthly transfer. This seems very high considering the amount of space that you are given. You also get unlimited POP email accounts. This is nice. Most other free hosting sites either just give you less than a handful or none at all. With Google providing unlimited accounts to any domain, then having a small amount of email accounts can be worked around. The other thing that caught my eye was the control panel that HyperPHP uses. They are using VistaPanel, and when doing a search for the application, I could only find one site about it. From the screenshots that I saw, it looks like this control panel would be easy to use. HyperPHP does support PHP5, so that is a bonus since some paid hosting is still only using PHP4. The 5 databases you receive is also nice. They also provide a Fantastico like installer which allows you to install more popular web applications like WordPress, phpBB, Joomla, and many more. Overall, this looks like a free host that has a lot to offer. This site would be perfect if you are just starting a website from the ground up, and want to test your ideas before you jump head first into a new project.

Fusedtree.com is another free hosting site that seems to be perfect for someone who is just starting to get into web design or web programming. The free hosting can also be used for a personal site, with 20 gigabytes of space, and a 200 gigabyte transfer. Fusedtree, also supports PHP5, and allows for 5 MYSQL databases. If you are looking for a blogging site, with a small forum, it seems that the space, bandwidth, and databases provided would allow for this.

Fusedtree does not provide any information on their website about ads. If you were to base the ads off of their website, it seems that they are using Adsense, and may require that you place them on your site. With most sites using Adsense, this shouldn’t be too big of an issue

Over all, Fusedtree.com seems like a nice host for a small personal site like a blog, and provides more than enough for someone who is just getting into web design or web programming.

Based on what 1st Free Hosting’s name, and the features they offer, it seems like this maybe a good choice for designers just getting their feet wet. There are some strong features that other free hosts should pick up on, like the 20 gigs of bandwidth a month. You also get 20 gigabytes of space. After these two details, the features seem to get a little fuzzy. The site does offer PHP 5 and MySQl 5 support. They do not provide you with how many databases you get per account. They also tell you they have powerful servers, and per-installed scripts, but again there is little information on these features. Also, according to their front page, the free hosting does not force you to use ads.

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.