I have been advising a Thai person who wants to start their own buisness

to use a free website host to try to cut down on overheads- at least just until they have a positive cash flow.

The one is saw was Webs.com

http://webscom.zendesk.com/entries/166240-introduction-to-the-site-manager

But even though I was aware that you can have a free website- i couldnt really answer the questions

1. Are they reliable and is there a time limit on the " life " of that free webpage.

2. How can the host justify providing a website for free ?

I know these might sound basic questions but I admit i dont have the answer to them

It's a numbers game: a proportion of those on the free services will pay for add-on services or the pro packages.

Plus, once registered the company can relentlessly market their paid-for services to you.

I have no experience of the company you named and personally avoid site building wizards like the plague.

The trouble normally arrives when you want to move away, they will normally own your domain name and charge a small fortune if they even let you take it elsewhere.

Also you are severely restricted in what you can do on these systems.

If your friend is serious about their business, avoid a free website. You get what you pay for.

A company that I rarely recommend for hosting but will in this case is godaddy.

They are cheap, have some of the cheapest domain names available, offer site builders and autoinstallers for software such as wordpress.

Best of all they are reputable company, the website and domain will belong to you (as long as you make renewal payments).

Their shared hosting is a little slow and they do have some restrictions in place which will annoy advanced developers but for a cheap simple website they are fine.

I have looked into free website, both hosting and just domains. Not very good experience.

I have had good experience with 1and1.com and it's only US$5/month. Their website tools are quite excellent, including a website builder wizard.

i running some subwebsites of mine on http://www.freei.me

never discovered any annoying "sideeffects"

I have looked into free website, both hosting and just domains. Not very good experience.

I have had good experience with 1and1.com and it's only US$5/month. Their website tools are quite excellent, including a website builder wizard.

What structure does the wizard give you?

I've seen several that still build websites in tables, which is an instant fail.

If the following possibilities are "acceptable" to the business then go ahead:

1) Advertisements suddenly start showing (popups etc..) on your site

2) Account is suddenly removed completely and your website is gone.

3) Website starts to become extremely slow and unusably.

If you are fine with keeping a constant up-to-date backup of the website and if any of these worst case scenarios happen you'd be OK to find new hosting and move your site (taking it offline for a few days), then go ahead with free hosting.

But keep in mind that you will have no grounds to complain or any expectation of improvement should trouble arise.

Webhosts generally offer free hosting for one of these reasons:

A ) They run advertisements on your site and collect revenue that way.

B ) They expect you to "outgrow" your free plan (ie you need more space/features/bandwidth etc...) so you have to upgrade to a paid plan (and you don't want the hassle of transferring to a new hosting so you just upgrade.

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR YOUR REPLIES - VERY USEFUL AND INTERESTING COMMENTS

Webs is not the worst ones but they spoil your pages with a real ugly banner on top.

This list shows the best selected free webhosts with or without a pagecreator. All tested by myself and all very OK. If you wanna learn about real webdesign I suggest go for 110mb.com or squeebs as they allow you to upload your html page with an FTP client, instead of being bound to an instant looking website, but some offer starting with a 'blank page'

000Webhost (free, no ads)

110mb.com

Blinkweb (free, no ads)

Doodlekit (free, ads)

Dot Easy Basic

Free Webhost Review (info)

Freebee Hosting (no ads)

FreeHostia (free, no ads)

Google Sites (free wiki, no ads)

MoonFruit

Smashing Apps (webhost reviews)

Sqweebs (ftp upload)

Webnode

Webs (free, ads)

Weebly (free, no ads)

Wix (flash, free, ads)

WordPress (free, no ads)

X10 Hosting

Yola (free, no ads)

Zymic (free webhost)

If you know that a very easy to use, professional webhost such as one.com offers an all-in package for a can of beer per month, $1,45 including your own domain name and a royal webspace, photogallery, blogs, google adwords $50 coupon etc. etc. etc. you can think of getting your own, for total freedom and control over your site. Worth to check this one.

Success

Some domain suggestion tools that show you available domains and some good info.

123 Finder

Bust A Name

Choosing a Good Domain (info)

NameBoy

Tucows Domains Help Site

Whois

anyone taken a look at http://www.free-webhosts.com/ ?

I used this one in the past: jaguarpc.com and can recommend them.

They have excellent servers and your site will load in seconds, unlike freebies which can timeout every so often. If that happens, the user gets a message like "Site is taking too long to respond" at which point the would-be customer goes elsewhere.

Can anyone who uses the wizard builders confirm what site structure they generate? Is it div based or table based?

Many I've seen are still table based, but would be interested to know about the sites recommended in this thread.

Can anyone who uses the wizard builders confirm what site structure they generate? Is it div based or table based?

Many I've seen are still table based, but would be interested to know about the sites recommended in this thread.

Thats easy to find out via a Google serach query like '.webs.com' '.weebly.com' '.wix.com' '.yolasites.com' etc.

Some experiences with wysiwyg pagecreators would be interesting also. The codes they produce did improve a lot, and I've seen some serious wysiwyg made company sites.

Can anyone who uses the wizard builders confirm what site structure they generate? Is it div based or table based?

Many I've seen are still table based, but would be interested to know about the sites recommended in this thread.

Yes a lot of them are. The website that we advised a client during the week to forget about spending even $1 on trying to SEO and instead replace with a universally acceptable and modern eCommerce solution was table-based – ProStores – that mickey mouse eCoomerce solution from ebay. Total waste of time even uploading products to it. The first time I've seen a website with an Alexa ranking in the 20 million + range for a long, long, time.

Obviously she loves her little website because despite the fact we outlined about 10 reasons why we wouldn't take the job and she was wasting her money we got not response to out suggestion. Then again, her first reply to us was typical of so many Thai website owners: "We are very small and on an extremely tight budget as our funds are going into our product line and initial set up costs."

Though the site is only 10 months old, to claim to be still pouring funds into the initial setup costs while sitting in the equivalent of the Internet Antarctic at 22 million Alexa shows there is something definitely wrong with the site. But hey, that's what happens with free.