Freewebs

From Ultimatewiki

Freewebs is a free web hosting website which originally started in 2001. Freewebs was founded by CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada and his brother, CTO Zeki Mokhtarzada. Other staff include president Shervin Pishevar, vice president of marketing and operations Robert Ewald, and vice president of products and programming Rick Robinson.

Piczo, Googlepages, MySpace, .tk and Xanga are among its competitors.

Freewebs is TechTeam's main host, hosting The Ultimate Site, Tech Testament and Tech Testament Explained.

Websites

Freewebs is an ad based free web hosting service that allows advanced users to make their own web site. There are three ways of going about this, each for users with different levels of HTML coding knowledge. As of October 18, 2006, there are 42 different styles for templates, each with their own subcategories (colours, specific themes, etc.). For users with knowledge of CSS, a style.css file is created in the File Manager, and users may update it through the Easy Site Builder's Site Manager. For members with advanced knowledge of HTML and other codes, a downgrade to HTML-Only mode option is available. Then, the HTML Mode's Site Manager becomes similar to the File Manager, and all pages are shown as their .htm files. These files can be modified using the Freewebs WebzEdit™ text editor.

There are two ways to edit a web page on one’s website. Users may either use a WYSIWYG page editor, or an HTML editor. Although the free membership does not originally contain any forced advertisements (if using the advanced HTML editor), they do require placement of a text link back to them on your website. The majority of Freewebs member's sites include forced advertising.

Drawbacks

Freewebs is not a full fledged hosting service. They don't offer colocation services, MySQL databases, PHP, or other scripting languages beyond a CGI-bin (and that's for premium members only). They are suited well for the average person starting up a personal or very small business site, not for the pro.