A friend of mine pointed me to 1and1.com, where they are giving away 3 years of free hosting to generate word of mouth promotion (like this) until Jan 21. I’ve read through some of their FAQs, and it seems legit: 500MB space, 5GB transfer, PHP, MySQL, etc – and their overflow bandwidth is cheap at 99cents/GB. They’ll even register domains for you for only $5.99/yr.
The only catch I’ve found is that you don’t receive phone support, but I don’t consider that much of a catch (who calls their host anyway?).
I haven’t signed on with them (my current host keeps me pretty happy – and supports FlashComm), but even so, I’m tempted to dream up a new domain to register with 1and1.
Hmmmmm… Suddenly visions of verafleischer.com are starting to come into focus. Thanks for the tip!
Who is your host? I specifically dropped Dreamhost.com because when there was a problem, I couldn’t call them to resolve it, and their web panel was slow and clunky, and went to Mediatemple instead because they had Flashcom + phone support. I’ve called them at 2am looking for my password, and they got back to me in 30 seconds… It helps I’m on the east coast, but still, that was just so cool. If you have someone cheaper for Flashcom and tons of HD + phone, let me know!
I’m hosted by http://netkeepers.ca/ . They specialize in hosting digital media professionals, and offer phone support.
They have a single package which offers 500MB space / 5GB transfer, FlashComm, CFMX, PHP, Remoting, Perl, etc for $25cdn (~$18usd) per month.
I use 1and1 for my old gaming website. I bought a new server and host my toolblast site myself, but my old gaming website requires a lot of space and bandwidth (www.fullertonflash.com) so I found 1and1 and signed up (its not like I have anything to lose) and its awesume.
What you do is signup, you tell them a phone number (i told them my cell phone number) and they phone it free of charge and when you pick up an automated system reads out a 4 digit number and you write that down and then type it on the setup website page. Then your all ready to go. Simple as that. No credit cards, no long signup page, nothing. Just that easy.
Their interface is a bit complex (complex as it hard to use and lots of useless pages that could have been put into 1) but other than that its good.
Only down side I’ve found is that with the free account they give you a super long random domain such as fww3aw99323.1and1.com
So if you are smart you just forward your real domain to that address in a frame. Or, if you even smarter, you can find 1and1’s nameserver page and then change your DNS to their nameservers so you no longer have that long domain and your .com is used instead (eg: http://www.yoursite.com/page.html)
Anyways, they are good for a free 500mb and it isn’t fake. Its all real. You dont need phone support or any support at all. Nothing has gone wrong for me so far and they have good backups and no glitches.
Go 1and1!
p.s. once my 3 years are up i probably wont buy a package with them cause they cost a fortune, but free packages sound nice 🙂