With all of my experience in the web hosting industry (specifically FREE web hosting), the new free hosting directory makes a lot of sense. During the last decade I went from being in the shoes of a customer looking for hosting, to developing and operating one of the biggest free web hosts around. During that process I have been able to compile a great amount of knowledge about the hundreds of other web hosts and their features.

The newly launched http://www.FreeHostingDirectory.com contains detailed information on almost all of the free hosts out there. In addition, all the hosts are broken up in distinct categories to help you quickly find what you are looking for (ie: PHP Hosting, MySQL Hosting, etc…).

Each category lists the web hosts based on a 10-star feature rating that helps you identify the host providing the best services for your needs. In fact, we have setup a system where visitors can even rate and review each web host to help others in their search for the perfect free web host.

Although we have not yet finished our expected 400+ database of web hosts, you are more than welcome to get a sneak peek and check out the site: http://www.FreeHostingDirectory.com.

In addition to the hosts that will be added, we also plan to add a resource and faq section that will help visitors with terminology as well as useful guides to help them get started building their site.

I ask that all of our blog readers help us welcome this new site by visiting the url and checking out some of the free web hosts. If you have used any of the hosts before, help us out and leave a review!

In terms of this blog, everything seems to have stayed pretty much the same. We now get a consistent 20 visitors/day from google searches (which is impressive since we haven’t done any SEO optimization). I’m also extremely surprised by the amount of spam we have been getting – there are over 100 spam comments that get submitted EVERY DAY. You’d think that people would eventually figure out that all comments are manually approved? On top of that, they come from different ip’s (so banning an ip or two doesn’t help). I guess that’s the price you pay for an increase in traffic?

On the T35 front, we have removed all pop-up ads from member pages, but I’ll post more on this later in the week. In the mean time, I had a chance to put together a quick site for myself and you can visit it at www.alexmelen.com. I’ve used the domain for my personal email account for years, but never had the chance to have anything up there. It’s not amazingly designed, or completely comprehensive, but at the very least gives a quick snapshot of the projects I’m currently involved in. You can also add me on the two social networking sites that I participate in – Facebook (personal) and LinkedIn (professional).

I again apologize for being absent for so long, I promise to follow this up with some actual posts in the coming week!

I am also hard at work wrapping up the php free web hosting comparison that I promised. If anyone has any last minute suggestions of free web hosts they want me to test, please let me know asap! I’m also open to suggestions on future testing and comparisons I can do. I’m thinking it might be worthwhile to start keeping track of up-time and other stats on the major free hosts. What do you guys think?

On the T35 Hosting front I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out why we come up #9 for “free web hosting” on yahoo, and barely break top 100 on google. Any SEO experts out there that want to help? On google, T35 Hosting isn’t even ranking high for its own company name of “T35 Hosting”!

The only rules are that the host must have a free web hosting plan (no post-to-host or anything that requires you to do something in exchange for the hosting). I also ask that the host you recommend be rated in the top 100,000 sites on alexa. (otherwise we’ll get too many small hosts that nobody uses or knows about). Once I get enough submissions I’ll be performing a realizability test as well as the php test over the span of one week. Then I’ll average the scores and post it up here. To kick this off I’m going to self nominate T35 Hosting (just because I’m curious how well we will stack up against the competition). Oh, and don’t worry, this test will be completely un-biased. I am just as interested to see how everyone stacks up as you guys!

My name is Alex and I founded a web hosting company (T35 Hosting) in 1997, moving it to the present day T35.com domain in march of 1999. For those of you wondering what “T35″ stands for (and i know you are!), the original concept was a top sites list — top 35. Hosting was only a side project and was run from hosting.t35.com. It didn’t take long for our hosting service to become so popular that we closed up the other sites and decided to focus on solely free web hosting. In fact, T35 Hosting quickly became one of the top 5,000 web properties in the world (as ranked by Alexa) and we have consistently maintained that ranking since then. It made sense to keep t35.com since members received “user.t35.com” URLs and t35.com allowed for shorter website addresses.

Since then, T35 Hosting has gone through many transformations and I have personally been involved not only with T35, but have worked on dozens of other projects along the way. These range from home-grown ideas like wisecounter.com (sold in 2006), to many other start-ups, spanning across several different industries.

With over 10 years of web hosting and web development experience under my belt, I decided this blog might be a good outlet to share some of my experiences. I am hoping that I can not only provide a helpful insight into the world of web hosting, but to share all the knowledge and information that I have learned in the last decade.

I hope to follow up this introductory post with some articles shortly. Expect something good in the next few days… definitely before the end of the weekend!