[chris.p]

Um, well that's kind of a tricky question.

I've got a lot of sites out there, as I have my own, and also manage them commercially for others.

But I very much wanted to see if there was a viable free hosting option, for several reasons:

- I want to know if free webhosts have caught up with the 21st century yet, and offer databases, FTP, htaccess etc
- This site needs to cover everything that is 'free'-related, and web stuff is kind of my department at the moment
- I sometimes need cheap or preferably free hosts for sites that don't earn anything for one reason or another - for example to park domains on, while getting some history, as parking pages are actually no good for that
- Trying out new ideas such as a niche blog will cost you $60 a year on normal hosting, and if it doesn't work out, that's down the pan - but free hosting will let you do more, as there is no risk
- There are economy hosts @ $10 - $30 a year but their service isn't very good - if a free host offers the same service level, then I'd use that

So there are a bunch of reasons why I wanted to do this. One or two more in fact.

But the key element is probably "Do free hosts offer a genuine modern service (ie with databases etc) or is it just for HTML sites?". And that's what I want to find out. There is a big difference between the facilities that a host needs to offer for basic hand-coded sites or for database-driven ones.

[edit - to make this clearer]
Surely, anyone would consider that a WordPress blog is a normal site, today? Nothing special or fancy - yes? So all I'm trying to do is find a free host that is a viable option for a very simple site like this. Not much to ask, you'd think. And as I say, I wouldn't complain about low resource allocations (webspace, bandwidth) because if I need more then the site must be successful and I could pay.

But so far I just can't find a host that provides a simple, basic service.