Hosting Change

Why Not Tripod

Congratulations, you've found me. I've abandoned my Tripod site. I had been a Tripod customer for over a decade. The reasons I'm not hosting my site there anymore are:

• Agressive Advertising. The advertisements had gotten too aggressive. I'm fine with banner ads. But pop up and hover ads made my site hard to navigate.
• Dropped functionality. I was an old school free customer. But slowly the classic functionality was being abandoned by Tripod for their in house website builder. When they dropped CGI support for free accounts, I was forced to either give up contact forms or use their builder to redo the site.

Why Weebly

I decided to look at other free hosting solutions. I had tried a couple of sites and my wife suggested Weebly. It's turned out to be the best I found because:

• Less advertising. Weebly has thought things through with their business model. Free accounts carry Weebly branding. We also pay to have an online store. If I make money on my site they make money. If they host it for free, I advertise for them. It makes sense.
• No arbitrary limit on pages. Other free hosts (including the new Tripod builder) limited the number of pages on free accounts to an handful or two. Weebly does limit some functionality, but it's well thought out so my page carries their brand responsibly. The less limited my content, the better they can attract business.
• Good website builder. You can create a great page without knowing a thing about HTML, CSS, or the other technologies behind web pages. It's intuitive for the average person. But their tools are flexible enough that you can dig around in code if you want too.
• Built in mobile website view. Around 10% of my traffic is mobile. Weebly was the only host that provided mobile automatically for free. A desktop web page is no fun viewing on a phone.
• Lots of documentation and support. Almost as easy to use as the web page builder.

Why Free Website Hosting

I can afford paid hosting, and I've hosted this content with a paid host before. Here's why I went with free hosting:

• Some security concerns about owning a domain name. Owning a domain name isn't worth the risk of being registered and your registration being public for a personal website. You can buy domain privacy, but you still share some personal information. If no one is paying you for content, its not worth the risk.
• Lead by example. Perhaps you want a personal website and you can't afford hosting. Free hosted sites give some direction to people interested.
• Let's face it. If you have some project you want to share on the Internet and no one is paying you for using it, why should you pay to make it available? And why should the cost of hosting limit your ability to share a good idea?

So, if you have a good idea, story, music, pictures, or videos, etc...just put it out there!!! It'll be worth it. And Weebly is both easy enough and inexpensive enough anyone can do it!

Now that I'm not messing around with a website, I've got more time to spend with this little guy, his brother and sister, and most importantly, his mom.