Geekity geek geek

I went on the prowl for webhosts with CGI and Perl capabilities today for jemima today. I found a whole listing here. I'm not speaking to the quality -- some are definitly better than others -- but I was interested to see the whole "no ad" movement lives and is as strong as ever. It's a tough trade-off. You get bombarded with ads on sites like Geocities, Fortunecity, what have you, but they tend to be fairly reliable sites and easy as heck to use.

But these days, webhosting is really, really cheap. I found some plans for as little as $2.50/month, and most plans are around $7/month. Even Geocities offers webhosting for not a lot of money; examples of other pricing plans are here.

Now I understand there is still some philosophical push-back on the idea of paying for hosting. I've never understood it, mostly because I believe to get something, you have to give something back in return. That means eventually your free webhost is going to smack ads all over your lovely layout or take away features once promised. I still lament the loss of FTP from Geocities -- funny, when I started this whole web stuff back in '98, I loved browser upload and thought FTP was the work of the devil; FTP is so much better, and free of browser 'issues' too.

Every now and then, I do prowl for webspace. You never know when you might suddenly come into the need for webspace so it's good to know what's out there. Still, it makes me very glad for the largesse of the brother as it means I will never ever be subject to the whims of a free ad-hosting company and their random changes in ToS either.