Freewebs - too good to be true? |
Freewebs is a new service (apparently founded in
2003) which promised to be "different" from other web site hosts. They
stated
Being the skeptic I am, my first thought "This sounds too good to be true" and my second thought was "how are they paying for maintaining their servers?" First of all, keep in mind that it's common practice on the web for new services to offer astounding deals in the beginning to get you to buy in. Then, when they feel you have invested too much to move, they write "oh sorry, we so wanted to continue the free service but we are 'forced' to now charge" (and often the charge is more than the other sites they so dissed in the beginning). Typically, people are less than thrilled when their freebie site which they have spent a lot of time with, has become banner city or pop-up central and anyway, who wants to pay for what you got for free. I am of course, judging by hosts like Geocities which are owned by huge companies and have throughout the years become less and less client oriented (far as I am concerned, even their pay service lacks). Worse yet, for some, the next step is, if the web hosting company cannot get people to pay the fees, they go away. That happened to me with the site "Photo point" - awesome software and I even PAID for the site and then it (and all my uploaded photos) disappeared overnight with no warning. So my skepticism about Freewebs was understandable and when a user complained to me about their files disappearing etc, I tried to investigate. I found that I could NOT get hold of any of the operators of the site. After several abortive attempts, I accessed a site called Freewebs had a rating on there and it was on the low side. Users complained about no FTP access, the service being slow, files disappearing and being unable to contact tech support (aha, I had found that one!). So I wrote an article, writing off Freewebs as a web host. However, recently, I received a phone call from a charming person who is - a fulltime tech support person for Freewebs. He went through some hoops to obtain my phone number because I forgot (like duh) to put a "contact us" page on my Healthread site! He said he felt my article was inaccurate and after we had chatted for while, I agreed with him about the content of my article. I found out Freewebs had been a startup company to offer people with no technical know-how, the chance to have a website! They were actually offering a unique service like they stated on their homepage (well, there is always an exception to the rule!). Perhaps the reason early users found the service slow is it started up on a PC with a Pentium 3! But now freewebs has come to be a mature company with several large fast servers, a company which has built its popularity (I was informed they have "millions" of clients, most of them enjoying the service for free) FROM being different. And from offering what appears to be some of the best website building tools available! They are discussing banner ads to be added to freesites after 45 days (to be competitive). Also, the webtools require your popup blocker to be turned off or temporarily overridden. Free users get 50 files per site (but can use the "site-builder" for 7 pages only because those are created with a template (you get to choose from several different ones). You can, however, create other pages off line, use their file manager and link in. And by the way, you now, can easily contact Freewebs through their new live chat feature. Don't worry about Freewebs.com "going away" in the near future - they have millions of users and are doing well financially even with only a small percentage of users being pay users. Is Freewebs for techies also? They now have their pay options available for viewing and are competitive with other services as far as what they offer to techies. While they do not support FrontPage Extensions, you can create a form with frontpage and link to their own programs. You can also become a free advanced user which will give you FTP access (you won't have access to the webtools then but most FTP users do their development at home). Freewebs.com is rapidly growing and has become an impressive presence in the land of webhosts. And bottom line, I decided to use their service to set up a site for my favorite passion, trikkes! I joined as a "Beginner" user and found their web tools basically nice although I could not figure out how to use certain features (like editing the placement of photos). I'm sure these were "geek" needs which would not bother the average user. And they do provide a nice little feature of doing the page in HTML which I ended up using! I liked the way links are added to the side and as they promise, you can get a site up in (well not 60 seconds) but perhaps less than an hour. Here's the site I made: Sue's Trikke Site Is Freewebs "too good to be true"? Well, occasionally something to good to be true is really true and freewebs.com appears to be in this category! |