Hi,

My son asked me to find a service where he can create his own web-site free of charge, yet have at least part of the URL in his selected name. He also would need helping software to create his site.

It does not have to be a Thai host but should be capable to handle Thai fonts.

Of course ads come with all free services and this is no problem as long as the ads are "clean"

I've googled about it but it is a jungle out there and I'm not in the mood to check out each and every available service.

Does anybody have experience with a kid-safe service for creating and hosting free web-sites?

Thanks for any info

opalhort

There are dozens of free hosting sites as you are aware.

I started out many moons ago with http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/ according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire it's aimed at teens so the ads should be reasonably safe. Possibly an idea to sign up for him and verify for yourself.

An alternative is for your son to host his own website on a home server. He can then register his website's URL with a service like Dynamic DNS (http://www.dyndns.com).

I use my personal Fedora Core system to host my web pages and I use an application (that runs as a daemon in the background) to register my ISP-given IP address with Dynamic DNS. Then no matter where I am at, I merely have to use my chosen URL in lieu of my IP address to obtain access to my systems when I am away from home or when I want to share photos, music, etc with friends and family.

Oh, and by the way, my site has no ads!

http://www.geocities.com

http://www.blogger.com

allows you to use many different languages including thai.

Gumball is right!

Beside of my real Business Servers, I use for my private the service from No-IP which is very easy to configure. The Service in case of problems from No-IP is excellect. You can als run all kind of servers, incl. Mail server and so on. No-IP has free and paid services.

For my experiences No-IP has batter Service as DynDNS which I've use for several years too but stopped because of the better service from No-IP!

I would suggest care about posting too much personal data about himself.

I suggest you monitor what he is posting.

netfirms.com is decent, just a banner ad at the top of your pages.

http://www.netfirms.com/web-hosting/web-hosting-basic/

You can find others here: http://www.free-webhosts.com

Thank you very much for all the response and advise.

Gumball and Reimar are of course correct, but it gets too technical and requires his PC to be on at all times, something I object to.

Astral, I'm well aware of this matter and so is my son (no personal info apart from his nickname!).

His aim is to share experiences, videos, photos, games etc. with his friends.

He did already set up something on a blog site but the URL is "½ Km long", that's why he asked me to find a place where he can get a more reasonable URL.

He did try spruz.com and initially liked it but later it got too complicated for him while designing the site.

I'll give the various suggested sites a try and see what is suitable.

Thanks again

opalhort

If he need loads of space he might try xoomwebs.com. They offer 25 GB of free hosting, ad-free. I'm testing them now.

You could try www.blogspot.com (owned by google). Its free and when you go to the page from Thailand its all in Thai, it took me ages to figure out how to get it in english lol.

The url used to access would be yourusername.blogspot.com thats not too long is it ?

If that is too long you could buy a cheap domain name and have it redirect to the long url (easy to do via the control panel). You can direct to any url so even the one presently used would be ok.

geocities

an example of the url would be

www.goecities.com/yourson.htm

My son finally settled on spruz.com

He has overcome the initial problems.

Looks like spruz.com is quite OK for kids.

opalhort