Free Web Hosting Site Fooled Me

[anwiii 17]

polter explained it in plain english and if he's not a native speaker then could have fooled me. i AM a native speaker and i can say that anyone could have been mislead. and this SHOULD get a partial bad review because of it. also, from my own experience with companies and my own extensive research through a variety of companies, if they have to hide paid services within their free services intentionally, then i wont trust them and i wont pay for their paid service PERIOD because they are trying to hide something.

yes, this particular web host is one of the better ones but is not on my top 10. not because of the misleading adverts, but for other reasons that were already mentioned. they offer less free services than other companies. trap is good for the hosting alone(forget about the community environment) because they offer more free services than even the paid hosting accounts at other places. also, their paid service is cheap and affordable and still the quality i would look for. they are relatively new and need improvements, but quick to respond to any help needed and the staff is VERY VERY friendly. i look highly upon good customer relations and Xisto - Web Hosting has it. trap has it....and i'm sure all the other co's affiliated with xisto has it. trap is honest and up front and these are some of the reasons why you are here, polter is here and i am here.

in my strong opinion, i wouldn't recomend ANY site that would hide paid services and waste my time. my time is valuable and the paid services should be seperated so i know EXACTLY what's i'm getting. any good and reputable co. would do that and be smart enough to know this. why i believe this inparticular hosting co. has something to hide wether you go with the free service or the paid.

This hosting IS the best free hosting that isnt cpanel I have EVER come acrross.. no posting.. no nothing... been open 4 years, fast, always online... nffn rong with them.
EVERYBODY uses "*blah" so just because 1 person got mislead by these doesnt mean that the company should get bad review. NOBODY does it in plain english. Some even say its free then charge u

[craz 0]

Same thing happened to me, I signed up without really paying attention :/ Next thing you know, UPGRADE FREE PLAN! These websites can be a little misleading and I hope its a waste of their space and stuff. haha..

[polter 0]

in my strong opinion, i wouldn't recomend ANY site that would hide paid services and waste my time. my time is valuable and the paid services should be seperated so i know EXACTLY what's i'm getting. any good and reputable co. would do that and be smart enough to know this. why i believe this inparticular hosting co. has something to hide wether you go with the free service or the paid.

That's exactly the point I was trying to stress. Good hosting sites would list free and paid plans separately, without "hiding" paid features in the so-called free plan. If they offer free PHP that's great but if they want you to pay for the database, they should mention that too. That way we won't need to sign up, only to find out that you have to pay for the most essential features when you logged in to your Cpanel.

i hope Xisto will be my salvation.

I hope so too. Staff response is so quick. The other day I had problems creating emails and I posted it in the forum. I wake up this morning to find everything fixed. Long live Xisto! Edited December 22, 2007 by polter (see edit history)

[DeM0nFiRe 0]

Yes, 110mb does give you free PHP but charges you for the database, without which you can't run the website. hope you got my point.

Actually, if you made this php forum yourself, you could just make it use a flatfile database
And if you didn't make it, you could still theoretically change it so that it uses a flatfile database but that would be a pain.

[polter 0]

Actually, if you made this php forum yourself, you could just make it use a flatfile database :)And if you didn't make it, you could still theoretically change it so that it uses a flatfile database but that would be a pain.

flatfile database? I don't even know what that means . I'm new to all of these. All I know is that I create a forum using SMF, installed it with the installer, then use mySQL database to store data. Thanks for the information anyway

[musicmaza 0]

I was also fooled by one such free web hosting.It was freewebs What had gone wrong was that freewebs actually allow you to add only 20 pages after that you if you try to add more pages it give an annoying popup saying that "No more pages could be added",that was really annoying for me as I had built a good website and after I had made 20 pages I wanted to add more :fart:.

 

For me after this experience freewebs is the worst.

[mtnkatt69 0]

Hello All,

 

This is my first post so bear with me. It seems like there is always a catch with the word FREE. Of course, Mama always said nothing is for FREE.

Anyway, I just wanted to say the Xisto has a good concept, in giving free hosting for posting forums. I have not built a website yet on their server so I cannot rate their service, but I will in the future.

 

I have had a few hosting providers, but I am still somewhat new in designing websites, so I am always looking for new host providers.

 

Godaddy is fairly decent if you can handle the ad at the top, and I really liked 50webs.com in the beginning. I was good for the basic stuff without databases and such, which is the direction I have moved towards.

I really got hooked on Joomla, so I am always looking for something decent with MySql that can handle Joomla, and I found freehostia.com

 

All was good, the had a self-install script for Joomla, and seemed to work well with their Control Panel.

Then I saw that they disabled SMTP on free accounts only. I am sure in the lenghty TOS that it said SMTP was turned off, but alot of people, especially new designers do not know that it means your website cannot send emails. If someone emails you from like GMail then you can receive the email, but not respond.

I was really upset at first and opened a ticket. I got a good response at first, but after the First Reply the CSR Seemed really rude to me. I just don't see the point of "receiving" mail and not sending. I even tried using the Google Aps for your domain, and I can send and receive with an email from subdomain of freehostia, but my Joomla site cannot email registration details or anything alike.

I could not find a workaround, and that's fine. I will find another host providers, probably Xisto.com that will fit my needs.

 

I just wanted to kind of vent, so thanks for reading. I included a copy of the Ticket from Freehostia.com

 

Ticket # Subject Status Avg Answer Time Date of Opening

32690 Unable to send email... Unable to send email from Joomla Need Assistance 00 00:01:20 2008-01-02 23:20:24

 

Details: The newest response is on top, the first one is at bottom

2008-01-03 00:00:03 by jerada10 to Technical Support

Just to be clear, I can write a basic php mail script and execute, and it acts like it is sending the email with no errors. So does that mean you guys keep the emails? Why wouldn't an error come back????

2008-01-02 23:52:25 by jerada10 to Technical Support

This does not make sense. I have tried responding 5 or 6 times, and it never posts my comment back to you. It is a simple question, that I should not have to read hours of documentation, and by the way, most of the F.A.Q is for paid plans, not the free ones. When signed up, it says you get 3 email accounts and POP access. I guess I assumed you could send basic emails, but my bad, I guess the new thing is "receiving" email, not sending.

2008-01-02 23:45:49 by Technical Support to jerada10

Hello,

 

No! Please try to read most of our documentation in order to prevent future questions!

 

Best Regards,

James

Vote

Satisfaction 5

Courtesy 1

Overall 5

Timeliness 5

2008-01-02 23:44:37 by jerada10 to Technical Support

If I transfer over my domain name from Godaddy.com will that enable the php mail function??

2008-01-02 23:40:55 by Technical Support to jerada10

Hello,

 

No problem at all.

 

Best Regards,

James

Vote

Satisfaction 1

Courtesy 5

Overall 1

Timeliness 2

2008-01-02 23:39:08 by jerada10 to Technical Support

I am sorry, I thought the mail() function was included in PHP. I don't understand because most free hosting sites include a basic mail program for registering users.

2008-01-02 23:34:45 by Technical Support to jerada10

Hello,

 

Did you read my comment? No you can't use it.

 

Best Regards,

James

Vote

Satisfaction 5

Courtesy 1

Overall 5

Timeliness 5

2008-01-02 23:33:49 by jerada10 to Technical Support

If I have email accounts at a different domain, can I use that setting to email?

2008-01-02 23:21:46 by Technical Support to jerada10

Hello,

 

Thank you for contacting our Technical Support Department.

That's because the SMTP service, and mail() function are not allowed for free hosting account, and if you plan to use them in the future, please try to select a payable hosting package in order those services to became available for you. If you need anything else in the future, be it a question or trouble, just feel free to let us know. You're always welcome!

 

 

 

Best Regards,

James

End of Details

 

 

 

 

Thanks again,

Jeremy

[Carson 0]

One free web hosting site I came across fooled me into signing up with their promises of a PHP Sendmail feature, SMTP, and mySQL. And dya know what i found out after wasting my time signing up. Only the webspace and subdomain name were free, the rest you had to pay for it. What a rip off, man!

All these things actually used to be free, but I think 110mb.com just became too popular and it became too expensive to run, so they were forced to charge money for these features. At one point MySQL(enabled) stopped working altogether, thats when I came here. I still have an account with MySQL and sendmail all activated, which I got all for free because it's an old account which had the features before they started charging for them. That hosting service doesn't compare to this one though and I would never got back to it. It always gave me problems. I could keep my account active if I had to post like here, just by posting all my problems(I had to make quite a few posts on there forums).

[Picardim 0]

Ha, sounds like a lot of websites for "free hosting" rip deceive a person someway of another, I am still trying to find out what the catch is for this hosting service, other than the credits.

[tricky77puzzle 0]

I used to be at 110mb, until their MySQL databases went away.They sure didn't fool me when I first went there. It was, I believe 2000 MB (1.95 GB) of space, and 10000 Mb (9.77 GB) of bandwidth per month. And stuff like PHP and mySQL were there for no charge flat.

[slayerskins 0]

i went to a "free" one once... i signed up and it said 100% free hosting, no ad's for life, it was good had 12gb of space...THEN after a month, i got a phone call from one of my friends saying someone has hacked my site, i went to look and i saw it FULL OF AD's, pop up, banners...u name it, it had it! Then i loged in, and saw there was a message, your free trial has run out, please pay something like 20$ not sure what it was...to have your ad's removed...Hated thatcyaslayer

[crepusculart 0]

Free web hostings are really vicious sometimes (or often works as well...). I assume that I'm looking for a free hosting and I was till now searching for a "no ads" one. Actually, I found some but as I need some space (I want to upload my artwork on my site), I was even more selective. Actually, I've found a decent free web hosting, unknown to me (compared to 110mb.com). There was like 20G space and 300 gb BW (I'm not sure they would allow a site if it went that greedy on BW...). No ads and such, with PHP and MySQL. Sounds great... But then, as someone pointed out for freehostia (where I got through too), you couldn't send mail since the mail function was disabled... Great ! Plus, you couldn't upload .htaccess files, which sounds really awful to me. But when you asked the reason in the support forum, they just answered that it was for "security reasons"...and that the hosting was already well secured. Not convincing at all to me.Finally, I decided to give up on this web hosting, even if it wasn't vicious as the ones that have been described before my post ! I won't give the name because I don't think it's such a bad one. But it's quite a good one when you don't need that many features...Anyway, I came across Xisto totally randomly and it seems really interesting . I hope my needs will be fulfilled .

[albumfreak 0]

Ah yeah, you have to be careful with those. That's why I'm using Xisto, so far it appears to be very accomodating Just whatever you do, avoid byethost as I've used them before and they were absolutely horrible

Edited March 6, 2008 by albumfreak (see edit history)

[tartredarrow 0]

They did not "rip you off" unless they specifically said "Every single feature, including PHP Sendmail, SMTP, and mysql is free" and also must have had that in the TOS.
It pays to read tos, they could easily say "by clicking accept, you agree to pay %companyName% 10,000USD every day until christmas.

Actually there is little risk of actually being bound legally to a contract like that. Otherwise the internet would be flooded with TOS contracts like that. TOS (Terms of Service).... simply put, if you don't meet the terms of service, then they cancle your service.

[kobra500 1]

It says must activate which does not suggest money in any way shape or form! I think they should be clearer but I'' stick with Xisto!