GeoCities Logo

Long time ago before any of the social media websites as we know it today, there was a free service that started it all. I remember it vaguely when I had my first website, trying out the best thing that ever happened on the internet at that time. It was the 90′s, and the service was called GeoCities.

This new service must have done something right as it attracted such a big name as Yahoo!. Yahoo!, in turn, bought GeoCities in January 1999 for 3.57 billion in stock. Fast forward 10 years later, amidst the economic depression that hit the US economy, things have gone upside down for the service. Yahoo! has decided to shut down GeoCities at the end of 2009.

Was it a good decision? Was it another cost-cutting scheme that Yahoo! put in place to survive the economy? Whatever the reason was, for GeoCities users, the decision was surprising, but expected. Most of the GeoCities websites are non-active as its users simply had forgotten about them. Mostly, it was the nostalgic value that they’ll miss. Quite honestly, I don’t even remember mine.

There are a lot of free hosting services sprung out since the days of GeoCities – like Terapad, Bravenet, and SiteKreator, to name a few – but none has the bragging rights to be the first of its kind. GeoCities may be gone, but it will always be alive in our minds.

GeoCities No More

In this era of information and technology, people would want a website of their own, and it is only natural to build a solution for them to satisfy what they want. Website Builder applications have been gaining momentum as a popular niche today. More and more companies are emerging, offering better (or worst) set of features and tools. One such company is Terapad. Let’s see if it offers better or worst solutions.

Terapad is a web2.0 all-in-one website builder solution that requires no technical knowledge to set up. With Terapad, you will get 2 GB of space and 10 GB/month of traffic for free. You can also set up a blogging platform, a Paypal-ready online shop, a discussion forum, an image gallery, events pages, career tools, and free pages as many as you’d like. All pages can be set up easily with its control panel and a WYSIWYG editor. When adding contents with the WYSIWYG editor, Terapad allows you to embed codes using its HTML source tool. If those aren’t enough, you will also be able to integrate various widgets and third party tools such as: Sonific SongSpot, MeeboMe, FeedBurner, IndieKarma, Google Analytics, Digg, Del.Icio.Us, and Flickr to your website. With the control panel, you will have an ability to edit your site’s CSS, meta tags, view your site’s statistics, add users / editors, manage your members, add blogroll links, and many more. Users can select the features they wish to use (or not) on their site for free. Sweet! Check out out very own Terapad Website HERE (screenshot on the right)!

Overall, Terapad offers an amazing list of features with an easy to use control panel interface. Changing and adding things in your website is a matter of points and clicks. Each websites set up with Terapad will have Google Ads in it, which you can have removed for a small fee of $5.00 per month. By doing so, you will get another 10 GB of bandwith in. WorldTechLogic has reviewed several web builder solutions in the past, called: SiteKreator, BraveNet, FreeWebServices and EasySite, but none have the features lineup and ability as Terapad. Terapad‘s vast feature set makes it ideal for novice and power bloggers alike. But eventually, it all comes down to us; the users. Whether we want to use the easy one, the one with the most features, the one with the beautiful templates, etc, it’s really up to us. All have their own advantages, and fortunately, Terapad‘s is in its outstanding features and tools.

To signup for a Terapad account, you can click HERE!

Creating our own websites can be hard sometimes, especially if we don’t know anything about web programming. How can we make a decent website without the help of a web programmer? Various online web creation services have been introduced here, at WorldTechLogic. These type of services have become more popular these days. With the addition of SiteKreator, the competition has become stronger than ever.

SiteKreator is a complete Web 2.0 ajax-based publishing solution that enables you to instantly build and host elegant, integrated, and engaging web sites without any technical or design skills. SiteKreator can help you launch and manage an engaging and robust Web site for your business or organization, your artist portfolio or professional CV, your personal blog or family photo gallery. SiteKreator websites have two views – Normal view and Admin view. The Normal view is what visitors will see when accessing the site. The Admin view is accessible only for the site owner. Visually it is the same as Normal view except for the editing icons which let you manage content. With the SiteKreator Admin, you can add text, images, galleries, hits counter, HTML snippets, Forums, Blogs, Mailing Lists, and Online Forms with ease. Aside from that, you will also get a web statistic page and a SEO settings ability with meta tags. A Control Panel Menu is available in the top right corner of every page on your site. It lets you manage site structure, enable advanced content elements, view site statistics, update personal information, or change site design. You can also choose from the many pre-made templates available at SiteKreator to be used for your website. Your URL will be sitekreator.com/yourusername. Once ready with changes in Admin view, you can instantly publish them to Normal view with a single click.

You can check out our very own SiteKreator website HERE!

Overall, SiteKreator offers a new way of creating your own website. Editing pages are easy eventhough the icons are pretty small. But once you do get the hang of it, you will find that SiteKreator is intuitive and flexible. Too bad that there aren’t many web tools to choose from. WorldTechLogic has posted on several web creation services in the past, called BraveNet , FreeWebServices, and EasySite. I would say every one of them is great. Be sure to try out all of them and see which one you like the best. If you have found one, please let us know by commenting on this article!

You can signup for a SiteKreator by clicking HERE!

Are you one of those people who do not know any web programming languages? Would you like to create a website on your own? In order to help people create websites easily, many have tried to provide free web builder services in the past, but only a handful are really that good in capturing the needs of those people. With the current web2.0 technology, it is expected that there will be such applications based on Ajax that will come out. But will they be any good? We’ll see on the following review on one such site, EasySite.

EasySite is a free web2.0 ajax-based easy-to-use website builder. With the free edition of EasySite, you can change the entire look and feel of your website with a single mouse click, import any size and type of picture, Upload and host your own videos, create your own news pages or journals, post and share your favorite recipes online, create a forum, and add family members (up to 3) to your site. EasySite includes a large number of custom designs which you can choose for your website. With EasySite‘s picture feature, you can crop, zoom, rotate or even adjust brightness, contrast and sharpness. EasySite also includes special functions to create black and white pictures and reduce red-eye in pictures. With the family members feature, you can invite each of your family members to create their own personal page within your EasySite.

EasySite has a nice Site Admin page where you can administer your website easily. You can pick the look of your site, change your EasySite heading, turn off and on the various pages of your EasySite, create member logins for your EasySite and restrict certain pages to only be accessible by your easysite members. You can also purchase an upgrade to your EasySite account from this page. To see our custom built page, you can click HERE (various themes can be found on the upper right and below left small images).

Overall, EasySite is a good web builder application with a very easy to use interface. If you’re new to websites, EasySite may very well help you in making a good website. However, we feel that the features it currently has for the free accounts do not satisfy enough of our needs. Various web tools such as Chatrooms, Blogs, GuestBooks, Survey page, or 5 free pages, or even cooler features such as: ecommerce (shopping cart), Request Login, or File Upload pages are available only in the paid version. WorldTechLogic has posted two free hostings with web builders in the past: FreeWebServices and BraveNet, and unlike EasySite, both have an excellent line up of web tools at their disposal for free. EasySite, however, wins in its easy-to -use interface and faster response (loading time) factors due to its Ajax based service. EasySite is worth to try if you really want to build your website easily (like super easy), but we would suggest you to use the other Free Hosting Services for a much better web tools.

To see the comparison chart of EasySite‘s plans (Free, Standard $4.95 and Premium $10.95) and signup for one, you can click HERE!

With over 1,000 free web hosting providers to choose from these days, a good free hosting service is even harder to find, not to mention one with decent web tools and user interface. If you do a search for a free hosting in Google or Yahoo, you will find that not all services are completely “free”. There are a couple of companies that will ask you to buy the domain with them to use the service. This type of service we do not call FREE. So which ones are? Those services that involve no cost to set up a website. One of the Free Hosting service worth noted is FreeWebServices.

FreeWebServices (Public Beta) is a completely free web hosting service on the internet. We have covered FreeWebServices in the past (HERE is our earlier post), and since then, it has grown into a bigger application. Before, there were only a few of web tools users can use (RSS feed, Web Builder – SiteStudio, GuestBook, Forum and Online Gallery modules). But with rapid development framework, FreeWebServices has manage to add several additional excellent modules to their list. Such modules includes: A Blog, a CV Generator, a ShoutBox, Web Tags, and a Domain Shop modules. FreeWebServices also provides a free FTP connection to their server. You can use any FTP client softwares to connect directly to your free hosting account (image on the right).

There’s a feature worth using, since no other free hosting companies have it: Your own Catch-ALL email address. A Catch-All email will have ALL INCOMING emails directed to your domain go to this mailbox. If someone emails to info@worldtechlogic.ourprofile.us, or sales@worldtechlogic.ourprofile.us, or anything@worldtechlogic.ourprofile.us they will go inside this mailbox. That way, no emails will be lost. There is also a mail manager you can use with it (image below).

Another NEW feature is the ability to upgrade your free hosting URL to an actual domain name. You will have the ability to purchase domains, change its contact info, domain password, or NameServers (should you want to use that domain in another hosting company), just like having your own domain management account. The domain price is as low as $ 9.95 /year.

FreeWebServices will also have more features in the future. Such features are: A Premium account ($12 /year), and a social network capability. With the premium account, all of your ads will be removed, your disk space will be upgraded to an UNLIMITED website disk space (you still have to abide their policy) and you can have up to 100 actual mailboxes. You can still set one of these mailboxes as your catch all mailbox. There’s currently no news yet on the social networking capability, but from there, we can imagine that there will be A LOT MORE you can do with your account. We’ve posted another free hosting service in the past, BraveNet. Compare to BraveNet, FreeWebServices has fewer web tools. But keep in mind that BraveNet has been around for years. Still in Public Beta phase, FreeWebServices has sure come in a long way in such a short period of time.

Overall, we are impressed with what FreeWebServices has to offer. The User Interface is very easy to use, and using various modules will only take a few minutes to set up. With on-going developments and excellent line up of web tools, FreeWebServices is definitely on its way of becoming the number one free hosting service in the internet industry.

Checkout our newly created website built using SiteStudio of FreeWebServices by clicking HERE (image below). To signup for a FreeWebServices account, you can click HERE!

In this era of information, everyone is encourage to have a website. More and more people try their hands at creating their own so-called “home on the web”. However, there’ one big barrier to this: Many people don’t have the knowledge or tools to create a website. However good your ideas are, if you don’t know HTML, you will never have your own website. This is where Bravenet comes in handy.

Bravenet provides FREE web hosting, web builder, FTP access, and plenty of web tools, such as counters, guestbook, web cartoon, e-cards, vote caster, blogs, hit counter, and many many more. Whether starting a site from scratch, or looking for additions- there’s something for all. To build your FREE website, they provide you with a nice selection of templates. You can also build in HTML if you wish to. The services they provide are all very easy to set up, and can be used straight away. You simply sign up for a free account- and click on the services you want and follow the no-jargon instructions. The tools they provide allow you to create a site that looks professional, and is interactive. They prevent your site just having the boring ‘my first website look’- and turn them into the kind of place that people might actually choose to visit.

Obviously, it’s what’s on your site that counts. Nevertheless, without the right tools you could be never have a website even if you are an amazing writer. Overall, Bravenet does offer quite many tools for people who are new to the website making world. With its easy-to-use web builder, Bravenet has become a leading service in the industry. We have covered another excellent free hosting service in the past, called FreeWebServices. Still in public Beta phase, FreeWebServices is already following Bravenet‘s steps and have become a solid player in the free hosting arena. We’ll see which one will become the winner at the end.

Below is the website we created using BraveNet account. Feel free to check it out by clicking HERE. You can signup for a free Bravenet hosting account by clicking HERE!

Currently, there are a LOT of free hosting services on the internet. One of the new startup worth trying is the FreeWebServices. Currently in Beta Phase, FreeWebServices is looking strong with many features and modules available for its users.

FreeWebServices.net is a free service of Host Department LLC (www.hostdepartment.com), one of the leaders in managed web hosting services.

Features of the FreeWebServices are:

• 100MB FREE WEB SPACE
  Enough to store hundreds or even thousands of pages.
• FREE YOUR OWN SUB-DOMAIN
  Choose from the many domain name you can OWN for life.
• FREE YOUR OWN “CATCH ALL” EMAIL ADDRESS
  A great feature that you normally would not find in a free hosting services: Your own “catch-all” email address. The catch-all email “catches” every email sent to that mail box.
• FREE SUPER COOL WEBSITE CREATION SOFTWARE
  SiteStudio can give your business a professional looking web site in a short amount of time. With many templates to choose from, SiteStudio is truly one of the best Online Website Builder on the internet. You can go HERE for the SiteStudio Demo.
• FREE FULL FTP ACCESS
  Publish/Upload your website using any FTP Client or any other site publishing software.
• FREE FRESH CONTENT FOR YOUR VISITORS!
  Have fresh news, humor, jokes, and other fresh content delivered to your visitors every day. You can go HERE for the RSS Demo.
• FREE SITE VISITORS STATISTICS
  With this great feature, you can have an in depth knowledge of how well you are doing and who are your viewers. You can go HERE for the Statistic sample.
• OTHER FREE FEATURES!
  Guest book, message board, photo album, and much more to come.

There is an upcoming 1 GB of storage feature that is still being prepared. We will give you an update when the feature will be available for you. For now, you can signup for the FreeWebServices by clicking HERE!