When choosing a free host it is important to know what you need, not want.

If you are running a forum you need uptime and bandwidth, JConServ gives you just that, not much more but that is the good part, because remember in free hosting less is more.

Basically what you get is a fast forum, a professional/reliable host, but very little customization (eventhough there is 200+ templates) with 3 huuuuuge ads placed on each page (sample site)…

I have never heard of anybody giving out free top-level domain ( meaning .com’s, .net’s, and .org’s) registration for free, but HelioHost claims to be doing just that, ofcourse there are requirements and a lot of vague terms used to probably insure you never get to the point where you can actually get the free domain - free ipods anyone?

You must accumulate 5000 Helions at our partner HelioNet’s website and be an active member of it for at least four months to qualify.

Active member, in these terms usually means anything you are doing an active member can do more and better, so sorry but you don’t qualify thanks for your effort though. Also there is probably about a million things to do on the web that in four months will earn you the $1.99 needed to get a domain from Yahoo, anyhow lets check out the hosting plans maybe the deal gets better…

So they basically have two plans one with 150 MB space and 1.5 GB bandwidth and another with 250MB and 2.5GB bandwidth and two ways two earn the plans, posting or placing ads. The plans are stacked with all the features you get with a paid host, although their posting requirements are ridiculous, for the smaller plan you would have to do around 9 posts/day on their forum and for the slightly larger plan you would have to do 33 posts/day (full time job), that’s without skipping any days!

This posting for hosting model clearly doesn’t work and is evident by HelioHost’s own forum which features exciting threads such as Say some random Words!, Its fun saying random words! where members clearly are just trying to meet the crazy posting requirements.

So I would say HelioHost is worth trying out only if you want to opt for the plan with the ads and absolutely can’t live with out all the extra features, otherwise the space and bandwidth really are not enough to request such effort.

UPDATE:

Owner of HelioHost contacted me and it seems that I misunderstood the worth of a Helion, which is 10 posts, so actually it would be .9 posts/day and 3.3 posts/day for the bigger plan, not as bad if post-for-host is what you are after.

Mixiroo is a new free hosts, and they definitely look like it, apologizing for their design in their introduction…

Welcome to Mixiroo. We’re quite sorry for the site’s design. This is only temporary and we’ll be changing the looks of it soon enough. To start with, Mixiroo is more of a venue for people to test their HTML skills. By saying so, we don’t have features which involve server side scripting (PHP, ASP, etc) but we will include pre-script collections for counters, guestbooks and forums in the future.

Although that was kind of a sad introduction there were some good points like the fact that they don’t allow server side scripting and FTP, although this might alienate most people looking for hosting, this is good for those just looking to practice CSS/XHTML and other skills that don’t require dynamic languages on a reliable host which currently is with out any adverts.

I found their servers fast (at this point at least - the site is new but considering that they will not have scripting languages or FTP it should stay relatively fast), the registration is simple (although with way to many confirmations), and the control panel was also very simple.

Control Panel

Registration Process

Free-site-host.com is providing 5 GB of disk space and 100 GB monthly bandwidth which is more than enough for anyone who opted to go for a free host.

Registration is done in 2 steps, first you have to provide your user name and email, immediately you will get an email. Using a link in that email you have complete your registration, which I think it is a fair to ask.

Features include…

• 5,000MB (5GB) Disk Space
• 100,000MB (100GB) Bandwidth
• No Forced Ads on Your page
• Easy to use WYSIWYG Editor
• Full FTP Support
• PHP 5pres Support
• 10 mySQL databases
• Instant Activation
• One click blog and forum script install
• Free subdomain (yourname.free-site-host.com)
• Free domain name support (yourname.com)
• Live site statistics

This is the screen shot of the Free-site-host.com’s control panel.

Application installer has scripts like 4images, bBlog, coppermine, cutenews, gallery, Joomla, Mambo, MyBB, MyLittleForum, Nucleus, osCommerce, phpBB2, sBlog, SMF, tikiwiki, UseBB, wikiwig, wordpress, Xoops, and ZenCart available for install at the click of a button.

There is also an option to upgrade the free hosting account to a bigger storage space and bandwidth by paying a small amount.