Sorry about that.

I’ve been away for a few days or, rather, the blog has been unavailable (to you and me) for the last couple of days and, as you can see, I’m back ……. sort of.

I’m afraid I’m missing a couple of comments. I’m sorry about that but the site went down before I could take a backup.

So, apologies to Cecilieaux and Lola for the comments that have disappeared but, at the moment, I have no way to get them back.

I have, of course, had to move to a different hosting company. It’s the problem with having to have free hosting. The last were, as you probably know, a bit hit and miss anyway. They seemed to get better once they had advertisements but over last weekend it spent most of the time down. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I was away and could do nothing. By Sunday night it was back up and I had no way of knowing that it would be down (and stay down) by Monday morning.

Such is life.

Still, I have all my posts back and most comments, which is not so bad.

However, for those of you considering a free hosting company, I would suggest you avoid anything set up by Raymond. Koolserve.com promised the world – i.e. free hosting for ever – and then I saw this:

Look what I found on FreeWebSpace.net:

Quote From Raymond:

Quote
KoolServe.com

Kool Serve is a free hosting site launched in March 2011. Users are signup for free cPanel web hosting accounts and we generate revenue from users who purchase upgrades and from adverts placed on their sites among many other sources.

Kool Serve has done well in terms of traffic ( Alexa rank 27,059 ) and revenue. There is no cost in promotion. We have used the following free sources for traffic:

1. Free Hosting Directories

2. General word-of-mouth

3. Forum Threads

4. YouTube videos/FaceBook/Twitter/Blogs and more

We now have close to 10000 users and a very knowledgeable volunteer support team to assist in all manners of web hosting.

The domains ( koolserve.com and koolserve.net ), the support forum ( IPB software ), and iPanel are hosted on a personal server of mine.

The costs to maintain Kool Serve are:

Server Cost:

Free server : $215.00 /month
Paid Server: $8 0.99 /month

Software:

iPanel: $9.99 /month
Zamfoo: $7.95 /month

Monthly revenue:

$850+
The main source of revenue comes from upgrades to paid from free, ads on free users sites, and ads on the support forum.

Will sell for $5,000
Contact me at raymond@urhostz.com

Thread: http://www.freewebsp…iques-per-Month

Feh, he did the same with ************com, and if anyone has noticed, he runs more than 1 host, like ***********.com, no different then here really, but NEWER. Which means no ads on pages still, and no paid, which I’m sure will come soon… ugh… and then be sold to possibly someone who has no idea what their doing and the host will be GONE, including all your sites and everything else. So good luck to all the users, you’ll need it!

So much for the promises! I nearly thought of going for their pay-for servers. Thank goodness I didn’t.

In my hunt for a new free hosting company, I found he also ran infiniteserve (I now always check the forum for how many times, recently, the servers seem to be down) and, of course, urhostz.com.

I did sign up for one hosting company OpenHost.org. However, once I had signed up, I saw the nameservers were Koolserve :-D, so I dropped them immediately.

I ended up with FreeHostingCloud. They seem quite good and the service seems up most of the time.

Now I shall always look at the forums for mention of Raymond (or Vlad, Justin, Dennis, etc.) and avoid those places like the plague.

Still, as I said at the start, I’m back and can put Raymond and his croney’s to the back of my mind, for now.

p.s. I shall be working to get all the links back asap – not least because I use them to visit your blogs!