Web Hosting and Site Hosts

Tripod.com Free Web Hosting

By Ammon Johns

Tripod.com are one of the best known of all the free web hosting services available. As such they are much maligned and generally rather under-rated by many.

Tripod offer 50Mb of web space, some CGI support (Perl 5), and a lot of addons and tools. They offer urls that use your member name as a sub-domain, which can allow you to get some keywords in the domain name. However, as one of the biggest companies, many user names are taken, and you may have to get creative.

The free web space is paid for with banner advertising of course, but Tripod.com offer a lot more choices than most hosts.

The advertising can be in the form of a banner or a popup window (users choice), but uniquely, the banners are displayed within a customisable table, allowing you to set a background around the banners that suits your site.

Tripod also have a 'builders bucks' program that generates a modest revenue for the site owner from the page impressions generated. The rate is currently $1 per thousand page impressions if you generate over 1,000 page impressions per day, and half that for lesser levels of traffic.

Site building and maintenance features are very good, with tools to suit a variety of users. Direct FTP access is provided for those who dislike online file managers, but due to the sheer number of members, the FTP can occassionally be a little slow.

All in all, Tripod.com are a pretty good free host with fair uptimes and a lot more features than most.