My Free Hosting Nightmare!Freeyellow.com is a web hosting company that I used to host several of my web sites. Unfortunately the "free" part of it didn't last too long because in March 2004, I tried to access one of my sites and this is what was displayed on the homepage...
So basically anyone that did not want to pay, ended up losing their free site...period. I lost all six of my web sites, and there was no grandfather clause in effect that allowed anyone who already had a site to keep it for free. You either paid up or lost your site for good. They did send out a warning email to let people know they would start charging, but if you missed that email or you just didn't want to pay their prices, you still lost out. This is a classic example of what happens to so many free web hosters. They start off free, but you never know how long that free service will last. Thank goodness my sites were small and something I could afford to lose. But think about all the people who may have invested a lot more time into their sites and depended on Freeyellow.com's longevity. The other disappointing fact is that their prices are not even competitive with other web hosts. They went from free to charging $34.95 per month for only 300 megabytes of space. You can go to a company like WebsitePalace.com and get a ton of web page space for under $10 per month. What a rip-off by Freeyellow! I guess they hoped their existing customers will just want to keep their websites and feel it is too much of a hassle to switch hosts. I hope everyone else that hosted their site at Freeyellow jumped ship and realized their prices were severely inflated. Now you can see this is the risk you take when using the free web hosters. Take it from me. You're better off registering your own domain name and building your site from scratch. It's simple to setup, affordable and definitely worth the peace of mind. |