Free Web site Hosting without the Banner Ads? Looking for free web hosting with no annoying pop-ups, pop-unders, buttons, banners, headers or footers? And as well as this, you'd like 99.8 percent up-time, fast servers, access to the cgi-bin for scripts, FP extensions, PHP and MySQL databases and FTP access?

We went out searching for the best "no ads" totally free site hosting space deals around. The results: disappointing, they are very few and far between. Many have come and gone, or as in the case of Bizland, quite suddenly withdrawn their free service and demanded that all their customers begin paying. We took a look at the promotional information for over 300 free web hosting companies, but then also looked at customer reviews. There was usually a major difference in opinions.

There is still a plethora of free web hosts around, but most require that you carry their advertising or offer you a limited time for the free service, usually a year. On the up side of this, many of these companies do supply quality hosting with many services in exchange for having their banners served up on your pages. We did find that many of the non-banner supported free options were hosted on very slow servers. In a number of cases, the server failed to respond at all! How do non-banner free hosting companies make their money? These companies try to survive by enticing the freebie customers to take out their paid hosting space options, which is fair enough. Quite often, their paid hosting options are quite cheap. You'll find that if you utilize this kind of free site hosting, the services available are rather limited and you'll need to pay for things like Front Page extensions and access to the cgi-bin for scripts. The other way that they survive is through regular newsletters containing offers from companies that pay them for the ad space.

More...