Can anyone point me into a direction for some good/free webhosting deals.. I don't want geocities/aol/homestead/angelfire.... I am looking to even pay for hosting if I have to.

Thanks in advance.

I found this Dreamhost deal over at fatwallet.com. 77 cents per month. I've been using them for about a month now and have been very pleased.

http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/374872

you may want to try this webhost search engine to find a webhost that has the features you want. I have used it and it even gave reviews of the webhosts.

http://www.freewebspace.net/

Check out www.scaredrabbit.com. It has the more features for the price than anyone else out there I've seen & their customer support is fantastic.

~cta partyboy~

most of the excellent hosts only charge 5 bucks a month anyways.
I suggest 2 of the providers I use for clients:
1-and-1 http://www.1and1.com
Vortexhost http://www.vortexhost.com

I like 1and1. They discount for using linux based accounts over windows and they give a slew of features for $10 month including secure shell,m SSL and 3 domains(which are a couple of my requirements)

www.godaddy.com

The best deal I have found. I have my domain registered for three years, basic hosting for three years, my domain lookup information is private (my address and name are with-held from lookup's), all for $170 total (paid in full)! Plus they have decent support.

findfreehosting.net

I second 1and1. Just signed up $4.99/month for Linux hosting

lunarpages.com is decent.

I would also recommend GoDaddy. Have a few sites registered & hosted through them, also with domain info private. No problems past 4 years, reliable service. Lots of options if you're going to expand in the future. Reasonable prices: $8 to register, $4/month for a small website, another $8/year if you want to keep your info private.

I have been using 1 and 1 for over a little under a year and am currently looking for a new host. I really tried to give them a chance, but I cannot adequately express my disappointment with them. Their service is not at all reliable. I cannot tell you how much of my business email (as this is my business site) is dropped because of how often their servers crash. Since I purchased their service, I have had to call them no fewer than thirty times. When you consider many of these calls were to report their email server being down, it should give you an idea of just some of the problems I've had. Further, their webiste creator tools are NOT, in any way, shape or form, Mac compatible, but I've had so many problems trying to make use of the site with my PC, so I can't say it's entirely a Mac issue. I actually began keeping a log of all the calls I had to make for the service, but gave up after a few months. As a freelance artist/illustrator, I can't be dropping emails. I've had several clients report sending emails I've never received. And, no one at 1 and 1 has EVER been able to help me with this, much less explain it. Now, I temporarily use hotmail for my business email because even it's better than 1 and 1's service. In all fairness, the service representatives are very friendly and seem to want to help, but to this date, I've only had one actually follow-up a phone call with an email. In over thirty calls with issues, only one actually folowed it up (maybe the others tried emailing me and their mail server just dropped the emails). Very disappointing. And to top it off, after calling them two nights ago to try to get some reason why the person I was emailing wasn't getting my emails, and no one was getting my attachements, the service representative told me AOL is currently blocking all mail from 1 and 1 servers--the missing attachments were apparently just a mysterious hiccup in the system.

PLEASE save yourself the headaches I've had. If it were free, 1 and 1 wouldn't be worth it. If they paid me, 1 and 1 wouldn't be worth it. Instead, I suggest googling: web host review. I did this and found a couple great sites with fairly up-to-date reviews on some of the better web hosts out there. As soon as my work cools down for a bit, I'm going to use some of the many review services out there to find a new web host.

Best,
-B

Abbadon74, take a look at scaredrabbit.com. There up-time is fantastic, and they have everything you could want for the price. A great company I highly recomend.

~cta partyboy~

That sucks abbadon. I use them for our company and as far as hosting it is great. I don't use the email portion b/c I have yet to find a way to forward it to a real account. I don't want to have to go to their site to check it. So our company still uses a yahoo account(which sucks).

I've been using www.catalog.com for 5 years now and have had zero problems. Domain registration and basic hosting is $35 a year.

CTA Partyboy: Honestly, I could look at any website for a review, but my experience has been the very best barometer, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not lying or even exaggerating when I speak of how often my email is lost, or how often their server is down. And I certainly don't think the service representatives have been lying when they told me their servers were down. Maybe I'm an exception. I don't know. But I would NEVER recommend them to anyone. I really wish I had the time to list out all the phone calls I've had to make because of poor or unavailable service. I think that would be more than enough to convince anyone. But sometimes experience is the best teacher. And, hey, like I said, maybe I'm just an exception. Ironically, though, after I wrote my post last night, I checked my email and the server was unavailable. And, best of all, mail that I should have gotten two days ago finally came through. Unbelievable.

M. Corvin: I think that's a large part of my problem. I did work out a way to have my mail forwarded to my outlook express, HOWEVER, any mail that is forwarded is automatically cleaned out of the 1 and 1 internet inbox, which means, often, it's just simply gone. I'm really glad the service has been working for your business. Aside from problems with setting up my page (their website creator--again, according the the service reps I've spoken with, does not work with certain Mac Os's-- won't let me add or edit text on my Mac, but will let me upload images. The PC I use has been fairly inconsistent with the website creator, as well.), my ingoing email is the most important thing to my business. When I don't get that, I don't get work.

So make your own decisions, obviously. I just wanted to give you my perspective before you decided.

Best,

-B

I'm a designer so obviously I design and upload on my own and just use their service to host. I don't really use any of their tools except for the date on the homepage.

FWIW, I am on the 2 year(I think it was) trial that was offered last year. I think it works great for the price.

I appreciate the heads up on the email problem though, I want to set up email accounts with our url addy, but I guess I will skip it. If it ain't broke...