Free hosting at www.1and1.com for 36 months but there’s got to be a catch. I haven’t found it yet. Can you spot any?
Might be a good place to host a weblog and photos.
A great free host for a weblog with photos is:
www.easytravelpage.com
The site is very user friendly!
Ours is…
www.easytravelpage.com/stevesasha
How about the fact that you can’t sign up if you don’t live in the US or Canada?
I have a US address I can use. Let me try…
What I mean is how can it possibly be free for 36 months?
Okay, signed up using a US address and here’s what I got:
Your order has been accepted. Soon you will receive a confirmation e-mail to the address you provided during registration. It will explain the 4-step automated authentication process which activates your 1&1 hosting plan. During this process we will need a telephone number, where we can reach you, to provide you with a PIN. No credit card information is required to set up or to use the FREE Professional Package.
We are glad to have you as a part of our 1&1 community and thank you for signing up for our FREE Professional Package.
I did a search on goggle. Lots of people, like you, asking what the catch is, but no major problems reported yet. Maybe they want to give out free accounts so you can tell everyone how great they are ?
So how are you going to arrange to be in the US for the call? Or are you just going to get a friend to pretend to be you for them?
I don’t know. That’s why I put it in bold.
First I was thinking maybe they’re going to harvest email addresses and spam the heck out of everyone. Now that they’re requesting phone numbers, maybe everyone gets on a telemarketer’s list. I’m just thinking of all the overhead that’s got to be involved in maintaining such a free service for 36 months.
Please see my post above!
Stevieboy, I saw your post, thanks! Nice page and great photos. You and your girlfriend make a cute couple. I’m still curious though about how www.1and1.com can be free. Nothing’s free!!!
I signed up when this thread first came up. I used a tagged email address specific to them and so far have not received any marketing email or phone calls. They sent out one survey asking how they were doing, but that’s it. They are probably counting on you purchasing additional services (domain name, more bandwidth) and telling your friends about it once the free accounts promotion is finished.
this deal is legit. scour the deal websites(“hot deals” forum at anandtech.com or fatwallet.com forums). it’s been picked apart and so far noone’s found any catch. it doesn’t ask for credit card info. the phone number you give them they use to call you with a pre-recorded message with your pin number. if you’re worried about spam in your inbox, just create a new yahoo email.
the biggest catch might be that they could yank the deal suddenly and kill your website. so don’t host anything TOO important on it.
i did register a domain name with them. cost $5.99 which was much cheaper than most of the big registrars anyway. they’re a big euro company trying to get a presence in north america so i don’t imagine their network will go down anytime soon.
so it’s win-win. if you’re in the us or can get someone in the us to answer the phone to get the pin, i say go for it.
The guy who owns easytravelpage.com.com is a traveler. Not a corporation. He never asked for a phone number…maybe just an email. Haven’t even heard much from him. I can post up to 1 photo a day. So, 365 photos a year. There is also an option for viewing a slide show. It’s very user friendly as I mentioned above. I’d rather have my page hosted by a guy trying to help people than a corporation that’s trying to sign up as many people as possible. When your page is up, please post the link…I’ve shown you mine now you show me yours!!! 
I’ve hosted several websites with them for a couple of years in the UK. Never had any problems - always respond to customer queries etc.
The UK website is:
They don’t provide any free services but their hosting services are just about the cheapest around, as are more advanced packages including MySQL etc.
Steve
My guess is that they’re counting on getting a lot of people who don’t want to bother switching to another provider when they start charging in three years. What I wonder is, if you don’t register a domain, what kind of address do they give you? Can you link directly to files on the 1and1 site from another site? (Yahoo, for example, doesn’t seem to allow this) And what is the limit per file upload? I can’t find this info on their site.
I’m considering getting webspace from them to make a videos page connected to my regular site. I could upgrade my present service and get 1gig space and 2gigs bandwidth for 7 bucks a month, or I could sign up for 1and1, get free 500megs for three years and then start paying 30 bucks a month for it if I don’t leave at that time. I’m out of space on my own site now, and each video would be several megabytes in size. Hmm…
That’s mine. Haven’t posted anything on the site yet. If you already have a domain you can point it to them no charge. I haven’t really done anything with the account yet, so can’t really answer your other questions.
OK, spent a few minutes playing with my account.
No problem. Example:
Doesn’t seem to be a limit. You can update via ftp, FrontPage (spit), WebDAV, or you can ssh in to your account and get a limited though fairly robust Linux shell. Just transfered a whole gob of pages from my main web site in a few minutes with a single rsync command: jameslick.com/test/ Woo yeah. So in summary this is a real web account, not the crippled kind you usually get for free. Performance seems pretty decent too.
Thanks for the info, Jlick. Sounds like a good idea, for three years at least, after which you’ll have to pay $29 a month for the service. I wonder what they’ll do then?
Since they don’t require a credit card to sign up, it’s not like they are going to start charging you. They’ll probably keep some customers, lose a bunch more, and in the meantime (since the freebie ends soon) they’ll have a bunch of us freeloaders recommending them everytime someone asks who to use as a webhost. Some of those will end up buying service. And some of their freebie users will add on additional service for more diskspace, domain registration, etc.
Does anyone know if the site does not support Java… not that I intend to use much… but Attagirls brother in law reports that they don’t support Java… anyone?