Best alternative to .Mac?

[superspiffy]

Some questions to all you web builders/bloggers out there:

What do you guys think is the best alternative to .Mac for a casual personal webpage?
What do you personally use and why?
Does free hosting exist?

[djstarrock]

not many people look here. Well I use 12gbFree for my hosting its ok some limations but its cheap (free).

[superspiffy]

not many people look here. Well I use 12gbFree for my hosting its ok some limations but its cheap (free).

why does your My Website link directly to www.12gbfree.com?

[djstarrock]

why does your My Website link directly to www.12gbfree.com?

I have no idea I will try to fix it.
EDIT: 12gbFree must be down.

[afornander]

i use box.net (http://box.net) for an alternative idisk. u get 1gb free, but 5gb if u refer enough people to the site.;)

[-hh]

I think it depends on what you want.

For example, you can buy & set up your own domain for under $200/year. You'll have all the email addresses that you want, a chunk of storage for hosting files, it often comes with easy-to-use front end software to set up a blog or whatever else, etc...which makes it fairly comparable to the $180/year Family pack option from Apple.

What it won't have is the as-tight integration into Apple, such as iDisk. However, services like fatcow will actually give you enough GB of storage to make the service more useful for certain tasks (such as backing up data files). As such, .MAC is very much overdue for an update, so given that something seems to be expected to change this Tuesday, its worth waiting 24 hours.


-hh

[macuser9214]

as far as webhosting, I host my own stuff, on my mac mini.

[yagran]

a good alternative will be .mac 2.0

to be released in ~ 1 hour 20mins :D fingers crossed of course

[djstarrock]

I just changed to Freeweb7 (http://freeweb7.com) there a much better service plus no ads and there free.

[huntercr]

I just changed to Freeweb7 (http://freeweb7.com) there a much better service plus no ads and there free.

Yikes, they're not into the whole "freedom of speech" thing there are they....

From the site:

"Accounts from CHINA and IRAN or users using chinese or islamic languages will be REMOVED without notification."

[ChrisA]

Does free hosting exist?

Almost every ISP gives their users some amount of "free" web space.

If you have a full time Internet conection you can put your web pages on your
own computer. Of course then, you would have to leave the computer up and
running 24x7. For a low volume web site this is the simplest solution. If you
have many photos you can put them on flikr or photo bucket or the like and
link to them from you own pages.

.mac is good for people who don't know a lot about how the web and the Internet
works and would rather just pay $99 than spend the time learn. There are a lot of people with more money than time if you are one of them it's worth the price.

[Poff]

http://www.nearlyfreespeach.net/ is nice. Almost free and nice support.. :)

[ortuno2k]

Almost every ISP gives their users some amount of "free" web space.

.mac is good for people who don't know a lot about how the web and the Internet
works and would rather just pay $99 than spend the time learn. There are a lot of people with more money than time if you are one of them it's worth the price.

Not necessarily. For a lot of people you'll see it's just convenience, while others it's because it's easy to use.
I work in the IT industry and I have a .Mac account.
What's my reason? Integration. I don't really need or use the online storage from Apple, or their web hosting services - I've set up my own in the past.