I knew this day would come sooner or later… Fateback has started adding banner/text-links on the webpages they host. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily; only that it screws up half of my designs, rendering text unreadable in some cases and naviagation inaccessible in others. I wouldn’t object to a text link, but this one’s really ugly… although I’ve played around a bit with CSS to get around it somewhat.
No, no, I knew it had to happen eventually; I’ve been with Fateback for a heck of a long time, that’s all, and they had always cautioned that they were going to add text links one day… I just thought it wouldn’t be for a very, very long time. I mean, my first site hosted with them went all the way back to… probably late 2001 or some such time. Over two years. I just thought they’d never actually get around to it. I suppose that as ad-free free hosting gets scarce, they have to advertise their services.
And it’s a wakeup call, too. I’ve been looking for a decent free host for a fansite I’ve been planning to make. The ONLY thing I cannot stand are obtrusive ads. Banners, pop-ups, pop-unders…. I don’t like them. And that’s the reason why good free hosting’s been so hard to find. Free hosts, after all, have to support themselves somehow; there aren’t many out there who’d take an ever-growing hit to their pocketbook to continue offering the same level of service that they have been. I think I’m expecting too much.
When it comes to free hosting, I’m a picky hostee: I like no ads and FTP. Those are my requirements. I can live without a CGI-BIN. I can live without PHP. I can live without mySQL. I can tolerate browser uploading for certain sites only–fanlistings, for example, which don’t really require much uploading time after the initial layout. (Fansites, however, suck up a lot more space…) I can stand unobstrusive ads. Ones the user can close, like on Geocities.
This wasn’t such a problem when I first started out: there were plenty of ad-less hosts to choose from, and even if you couldn’t get onto one, there were ways around Tripod and Geocities ads, basically giving you ad-less hosting.
*shrugs* The death of free, reliable, ad-less hosting has come, it seems. When I can’t even rely on Fateback anymore…
What I need is my own webspace. I mean… I look at Jess, who got her own last year, and Emiko, who just set hers up recently… I can’t stand the fact that I’ll be sitting here sucking up Reina’s space for a long time to come. Paid hosting’s gotten a lot cheaper, too, and it’s not like I need 1 GB of space or anything >.O I won’t lie: I’ve been looking into this for a long time, ever since I got hosted by three different people–now it’s four. (Reina, Skylark, Andie-san, and Yika). And I am extremely grateful to all of these ladies for being so genial and generous.
I can’t explain the next point, but having your own webspace is liberating in a way. It’s your own space, and you don’t have to follow anyone’s rules but your own and your hosting company’s. I’m not saying that I feel repressed in any way by any of my hostesses; they’ve always been very tolerant of me and my sporadic updating ways, and they’ve always been there to help me when I’ve asked. No, these “standards” I’m talking about are something I’ve just made up in my head. They’re expectations I’ve placed upon myself.
*sigh*
