Okay, here's the deal. Grinchlover is a page I do for my own amusement and the amusement of other Grinch and Seuss fans. This site makes NO money! Thus, I felt it was only right to pay as little as possible for a host for it, since it was not and is not a business site.

     I hate banners and pop-ups as much as anyone, so I found a hosting service that promised no banners or pop-ups. The only thing you had to do was put a link to them on the index page somewhere. Sounded good. It was free.

      Shortly thereafter, we get a letter from some company called cheaphost.com who claimed to be our new host and that our free one went under and they took over all their accounts. The cost was like $2.99 or so. Ok, it wasn't free, but maybe banner and pop-up free, no fee hosting really was too good to be true. So we went with cheaphost. Well, here's a case of getting what you pay for, because they were utterly unprofessional and the site was down more than it was up. They took forever to answer emails and they generally were idiots. Eventually, they were completely gone without as much as a good-bye.

      Normally, a person could just switch to another host, right? Right. Except that not knowing any better, we had allowed the freehost fools to register our site for us and we had no control over it. We didn't even have the DNS numbers. You can't direct the world to your site without such an address. So we waited until it was up for renewal, and re-registered it with Go Daddy. We now have complete control. We did find another inexpensive hosting package, but it is a company who's been around for a while and I kept my eye on them, checking periodically for the last year and a half to be sure their site was still around. So far, they've been perfect and none of the sites I have hosted with them have been down at all.

     Understand that this can happen to you. If you are web-illiterate, find somebody who isn't. I like to design websites, but I'm not overly educated on the technicalities of them. It seemed tempting to us when this company offered free hosting, plus they would do all the work for us, including registering our domain. Since then, I have a very web-savvy guru helping me with any technical stuff.

     I strongly advise anyone looking for free hosting to consider the fact that if they aren't forcing you to have a banner or pop-up, and even if they are, be prepared for the possibility that they will be unreliable and your site might be down alot. Many people thought grinchlover.com was gone for good everytime the site was down and I received letters asking me about it. Our current host provides a basic package for $2.99 a month, paid in advance for a full year. Our previous service, cheaphost, was charging by the month. One month, we just didn't get charged and the site was permanently down, lost in cyberspace along with our address. Its probably worth paying a little something, even if your site is not a business. If I were going to go with something free again, I'd probably go with something more reputable, like geocities.com or something.

     So don't make the same mistake that my Martha May and I made. Register your own site with a reputable registrar, like Go Daddy and save all the emails with the information. Host your site with a company who's been around a while and isn't likely to take off overnight. Hopefully, grinchlover.com will be online without a glitch from now on. If we did end up with problems with this host, we would find another one, but rest assured, fellow Grinches, that grinchlover.com will always find its way back to the web!