I know that his group is always looking for something for free. I have no relationship with this company, yada, yada.

My daughter sent this to me this morning. There is a hosting company called 1 & 1 that has an offer that lasts until January 14, 2004. They will waive their setup fees and waive the monthly hosting fee for 3 years.

What's the catch? I asked that question as well. I went through their FAQ and the T&Cs and couldn't find one. When you signup they don't even require a credit card. They give you:

500 MB web space
5,000 MB/month traffic
CGI programming capability
FrontPage 2002 extensions
5 FTP accounts
PHP3 & PHP4
MySQL
Proxy SSL Secure Server
Cron Jobs
SSH Secure Shell Access
50 POP3 e-mail accounts (50 MB each)
Catch-all e-mail addresses
Auto-responders, unlimited forwarding.
50 subdomains

I went ahead and signed up. Their control panel is not that good, and is very slow. But, it's free. However, the actual web space that they give you performs very well.

Just thought that I would pass this along. Here is the link:

1 & 1

Nothing we small focused web hosts like to see more than the f**king Borg swarming in from Europe to America to assimiliate everything.

They nuked their bulbous ad budget and turned it into free subscriptions for 3 years for a limited time. Well, most of my customers hated their commercial ISP's with 800 numbers and insta-chats, and instead trust me to take care of them the right way. I can only imagine how unhappy people are going to be waiting 3+ hours for an email only service when their site is down.

Who knows, this may actually stir the pot and get more people on the net that will need real hosting down the road.