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64 pointstnolet37 comments

I just tried to create an account and got this error:

"Can't connect to newserv.freewha.com:443 (hostname verification failed) hostname verification failed at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/LWP/Protocol/http.pm line 50."

This reminds me of the days of Tripod and Geocities, and when ISPs gave you webspace and usenet access as part of the package. They also gave you their own email service which meant it was a real pain if you changed ISPs - my mother-in-law is still with btinternet because she's worried about losing her email address if she switches.

Wow, a Perl error in 2025?

I mean, my full time job still have a giant Perl application at it's core, but seeing it come up in random places is always heartwarming :)

Same here. I tried all the forms offered om that website to create an account and they all ended on different errors.

Not sure if it's meant to be but we left BT about 8 years ago and my dad's btinternet.com address is still live.

I just posted this as I noticed my handyman was hosting his site there. I felt very very nostalgic. The text, the buttons, everything. The mention they will "soon have SSL", unmetered traffic. Just good old early 2000s web.

Is that site still actively maintained? Footer says 2005-2023.

I like the old twitter logo in the News and FAQ sections though (the actual old twitter logo, not the one just before X)

who knows? My handyman's site still works, so there is that.

Sadly I've noticed that a lot of handymen and single person companies just have a link to their Facebook page.

Neocities might be a better option for those that are looking for something like this

https://neocities.org/

Neocities is delightful.

But, you can't run PHP on Neocities.

Neocities does not allow you to run any code, just static html serving

as god commanded

Limitations inspire creativity :D

If you're making a serious website, alternatives include Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Deno Deploy, and Fly

If you use any of these be prepared for them taking down your websites the moment you pop up on their radar monitors, for example when you get traffic.

Actually, that applies to any server, (web)hosting, datacenter rack, internet connection, bank account, domain name. As soon as your provider (or the powers that be) notices you, for example a complaint or a government official email, they will take down your hosted system or connection. In 45 year of internet and datacenters I never ever saw an exception to this rule. Even Tor hidden servers are taken down.

I notice that all most of these free hosts are pretty picky as far flagging/banning your account. And I'm not even saying sending a gazillion requests or doing something outlandish. I'm talking about sending 500 or 1000 requests a day to download small html files.

It is the sorta of thing I never had a problem using Neocities for small projects.

In the same realm of cheap hosting: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

Came here to mention NFS as well. Great service, been using them for years.

>> no ads for new sites

And when the site gets old? Then the ads will appear?

> More features will be soon available (e.g. SSL support -->https://)

between the broken english and 1999 feel of this geocities alternative, i can't imagine this as anything other than a place for someone to begin their web career at 9 years old

Just because it's using html2 and not 2024 Ajax and react and (insert other js frameworks here), doesn't mean it's a bad website... if anything, it's faster because it doesn't need to load all that unnecessary fluff.

Give me back my DHTML

I was puzzled by the invitation to register domain names through ProtonHosting. I didn’t look into it much, but it seems like ProtonHosting is linked to Betan, a company I can’t find much information about. Going up the nodes, I found that everything is done under the Newfold Digital group (afaik).

Don't know why Adsense has a format that takes up a third of phone screens with position:fixed

I've used this service a while ago, it was really messy, but somehow dealing with it and getting it to work was fun (or I just like to suffer).

It has a "retro" feel that, even if I didn't get to experience, feels nice.

This is very cool! I wonder how they can afford to maintain a service like this for free especially since you can run php.

I’m running a static site hosting service and even with that comes challenges with usage and scale.

It says it's run by volunteers, and PHP is pretty low requirements, especially for lower traffic sites. Also looks like they'll delete a site with no visitors for a month, which would clear out cruft fast, and they only mention up to PHP 7.3 which was EOL in 2021 so not sure how active they really are.

I feel like it can't be very sustainable if this HN post spurs a whole lot of heavy / experimental users to sign up.

The question is: where are they operating from?

What a great service. Younger me would have killed for something like this. I started my whole dev career thanks to ones like this back in the day. Good on these folks.

oracle gives 4 cores 24gb ram 200gb disk and 10tb egress free?

gcp gives 1 core, 1gb ram n 1gb bandwidth?

azurewebsites.net is free forever? php only no db?

fly.io supposedly 3 x 256mb instances free?

> Buying your domain from our domain registration site https://www.protonhosting.com will be as well a real help. We have good prices for almost all domains and regularly we run promos when you can register your domain for just few dollars.

The linked domain [1] redirects to [2] which is a reseller of Endurance International Group. Prices are not cheap for the domains to be honest.

[1] - https://www.protonhosting.com

[2] - https://protonhosting.supersite2.myorderbox.com/

5gb infinityfree

1gb awardspace

1gb zettahost

1gb googiehost

512mb x10

5gb profreehost

1gb freehosting

250mb freehostia

> Is there a way to create subdomains for my domain?

> Go to the same form for domain registration (on the same server) and register subdomain.domain.com, without www in front.

Will it check that you actually own the domain you’re getting the subdomain for first?

Surely you would need to put in a DNS entry pointing that subdomain to the host, meaning that it is done by default?

Apparently, they’re hosting your DNS, too:

> Our nameservers: ns1.freewha.com and ns2.freewha.com

I remember trying it out several years ago, when I was experimenting with hosting my website for the first times. The UX was terrible just as it is now, and I ended up never actually using it for much.

I then went on to try https://biz.nf, and I think they belong to the same category - free web hosting, provided by actual profit-driven corporations as opposed to orgs/collectives such as NeoCities, which seems to be stuck in time. Both continue to work in 2025, neither offers free HTTPS (which means those sites won't even open by default on most modern browsers), not much is known on who runs them, and neither has upgraded their graphics in (tens of?) years. But they do work.

I still have my Biz.NF account. I don't actually use it - the lack of SSL is a deal breaker for any potential serious use one might have - but I log into it from time to time, when I'm feeling nostalgic. There's something so charming about it, it's hard to explain. It might be the early 2000s web design aesthetic, with the cartoonish clip-art icons, heavy shadows and gradient backgrounds. Or it might be the memory of those times, when I thought that anything I could think of, I could develop, with my silly little free web hosting account.

I can't convince myself on how these sites still exist. Sure, they provide abysmal specs for the free tier, and they're quick to ban everything that they think is abuse. But they have staff, including the support agent who kindly explained to 13y/o me that the free tier doesn't allow your PHP scripts to fetch external resources, and the people taking care of the actual servers, providing support for the latest PHP versions, and more.

I'm fully convinced that these hosts will not be here in 10 years. It simply can't work. Biz.NF has paid services, but they're overpriced when compared to almost everything else. You can't convince me they're much profitable. Even their free hosting offerings are outdated - most of the comments here are talking about better alternatives. Biz.NF has recently discontinued the free website builder, without announcing any replacement. FreeWHA runs entirely on outdated software, and most features have been "coming soon" since before 2017.

They're probably the sites that best allow people to experience the "dead mall vibe" on the Internet (alongside Decentraland, for Folding Ideas fans). To me they feel like they're just going by inertia, surviving off of a handful of paid subscribers, some of which have probably forgotten they're subscribed at all.

At some point, some random guy is going to decide they can't be bothered to keep the lights on anymore - as little as that electricity bill might cost - and that will be the end for this corner of web history. And just like when I read in the news that the mall where I used to go as a child was closing down, I'm going to be sad when I receive the email of Biz.NF's end of service.

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