There was a certain advantage to working at a university during this time.  It was the early nineties.  The universities and all the collaborative research done my professors was one of the earliest applications to take advantage of the internet.  I was just amazed, that I could find so many other people in newsgroups that were interested in the same kinds of niche things that I was interested in.  I actually found an entire group of people on the news groups, that were big fans of Anne Macaffery and her Dragonriders of Pern series of books.  I had just gotten into reading again, and that was the series I had picked up.  Nobody I knew in real life had any interest in the books, but there was a rabid following online.  My first steps into an early form of social networking via the net had taken place.

Within a few years, I found myself online quite a bit, and even owned my own domain name.  I was as of yet not prepared to handle the web hosting on my own, so I enlisted the services of a gamer enthusiast, that had a server set up to host anyone with a games website for nothing.  The ultimate cheap web hosting deal of the time.  He actually registered the name and everything for me.  At one point, he moved on to other things, and generously transferred the domain name to me.  I still own that domain some ten years later.  For a while, I ran a web server out of my house, with an old PC I was no longer using.  It was a fun learning experience, where I learned lots about web hosting, mail servers and Linux administration in general.  These days, I pay to have my sites hosted, as it’s such a bargain anymore.  What with reseller hosting, seo hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers, there are far too many good choices to bother trying to run my own home server.  Besides, I have other fun techy things to discover these days.

I started out, looking for companies that offered free web hosting.  These companies make their money through other ways besides webmaster hosting fees.  They do so usually one of three or four ways.  The most popular seems to be placing their ads on your website pages.  Not a lot of people like this, and I’m one of them.   For the time being, I stay away from these, as I hate others ads on my sites.  Another approach some take, is that they hope as your website grows you will eventually move to a paid plan from them that has more benefits.  Disk space, CPU, bandwidth etc.   These were my favorite.   A third approach, is to force you post actively in their forum to keep your account active.  This way they grow an active community of webmasters, and attempt to monetize this community through ads or offers.  A fourth, and my least favorite, is a group that tries to get you to sign up for some promotional offer from a third party company (for which they get a kickback) before you get a free account.

However, I grew tired of trying to find good free web hosting accounts.  I also grew tired of their spotty support.   Lately, I’ve been searching out small companies that offer hosting for $10 to $20 per year.  They are usually resellers of larger host providers, but that’s ok with me.  It means I get lots of IPs for about a $1 or $2 per month per IP.  Plus, I can spread sites out across multiple physical machines.  If one server has problems, it only affects one website.  There’s nothing I hate more, than having a website down.  It can be a pain though, so finally finding a company that offers multiple IP hosting at a reasonable price is quite a relief.