Monday, December 14, 2009

Free Hosting with Godaddy Domain Purchase

Since hearing about Godaddy’s deal to include free (ad-supported) web space with every purchased domain name, I was curious.
So, tonight I registered a
new domain after I found a coupon for $6.95 domains at http://www.couponcraze.com/coupons/godaddy/
It only cost $7.20, after the ICANN fee, so I figured I couldn’t lose.
For web newbies, it could be confusing to find the details of how to get your free hosting space (it isn’t set up automatically,) but their
help pageshould explain the procedure.
I was offered a choice of Linux or Windows servers. (I chose Linux.) They also offer PHP support, but I am not sure if there are limits to use only their pre-approved scripts.
I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of space they were giving away. 5 GB (5,000 MB) of file space and 250 GB (250,000 MB) of bandwidth (data transfer). This seems almost too good to be true, and I am not sure how they would feel if someone was using all that bandwidth to host a popular podcast. Would they be shut off even if they stayed within the limits? I noticed in their
terms of service that the user is responsible for excessive overloading and that the site could be shut down (temporarily or permanently) if the load threatens the stability of its network.
If You are hosting Your web site on Go Daddy’s servers, You are responsible for ensuring that there is no excessive overloading on Go Daddy’s DNS or servers. In the event that You exceed Your allotted bandwidth and thereby overload Go Daddy ’s DNS or servers, You shall be assessed any and all fees, costs and penalties associated with such overloading. You may not use Go Daddy ’s servers and Your web site as a source, intermediary, reply to address, or destination address for mail bombs, Internet packet flooding, packet corruption, denial of service, or other abusive activities. Server hacking or other perpetration of security breaches is prohibited and Go Daddy reserves the right to remove sites that contain information about hacking or links to such information. Use of your web site as an anonymous gateway is prohibited. Go Daddy prohibits the use of software or scripts run on its servers that cause the server to load beyond a reasonable level, as determined by Go Daddy . You agree that Go Daddy reserves the right to remove Your web site temporarily or permanently from its hosting servers if Go Daddy is the recipient of activities that threaten the stability of its network. Further, if You are using ad-supported hosting, You acknowledge and agree that Go Daddy has the right to terminate Your Services in its sole discretion and for any reason, including, but not limited to, Your failure or unwillingness to comply with the terms and limitations of this Agreement, specifically, the content and material restrictions set forth in this Agreement.
Initially, after signing up, I was informed it could take 24 hours for the account to become active, but in less than a half hour, my account was up. Pretty good, Godaddy!
I received a Welcome email explaining my FTP information, and I quickly signed on and uploaded a index.html page. I was dying to check out the source code for validation purposes.
Eeek, validation is not possible with their added advertising coding; just like GeoCities, Godaddy adds a line of closing tags at the end of the tag and before their javaScript.

Perhaps missing tags in the users coding can alter the advertising placement, so they must insure that all important block-level tags are closed. Truthfully, the added code isn’t too obtrusive;
Tripod and some other free hosts are much worse.
I think this is a perfect way to get started with a web site. Since you retain ownership of your domain name, you can move it to a new host at anytime, and never lose your web site address. This wouldn’t be possible with other free accounts like
GeoCities, Tripod, or FreeWebs. Oh, and to be honest, I wouldn’t normally recommend GoDaddy as a “pay” hosting provider. Once you are ready to pay for hosting, browse the forums athttp://www.webhostingtalk.com and you will find lots of good hosting choices.
If you want to check out my new site, visit
disdatmac.com. I will be keeping the domain there for some time, while I test their hosting.

No comments:

Post a Comment