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.

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.