Free Web Hosts For Mini/Micro Niche Sites

I have spent a little while surveying the free services that let you create websites and here is a summary. I have not gone off the beaten track in search of website hosting so they will all be known names if you are into these sorts of things.

All of them allow you to redirect a domain name should you wish to do so. I am probably not going to worry about domain names for my first set of sites I want to create.

Google sites

• Can have ads
• Site often don't look great (probably not the fault of the software)
• Does not have the idea of publishing, well saving as a draft.
• Unlimited number of sites

Wordpress.com

• Not Allowed ads without paying!
• Otherwise great!
• Unlimited number of sites

Weebly

• Not a great editing experience
• Can have ads but take half your income
• Limited number of sites without paying

Blogger

• Allows ads
• Any number of sites

Tumblr

• Can embed ads 
• May fall foul of google content farm algorithms because of the way tumblr works.

Posterous

• Can get ads working ,although it looks a little bit of a hack, but uses iframes so I don’t think the ads will be context sensitve.
• It does however look like a good blogging platform.

Wordpress.com was instantly off the list once I realised they did not allow ads on it basic free account. Posterous was also off the list because of the hacky way you had to get adverts via iframes. This means the ads will not be context sensitive and that is bad.

Tumblr and the worry about content farms makes it a no go.

So off this list we are left with google products, Blogger and Google Sites. Blogger has a slight edge in terms of feeling like a better product for this sort of thing but in random searching seems to indicate blogs that have not been updated in a while suffer in search ranking problems. There is nothing concrete and I could happily ignore it but I do think many people see Blogger as a place where new content is always generated so look down on blog not updated for a while.

Plus if I used blogger I might be tempted treat it like another blog rather than a website.

It does sometime worry me how much I rely on google services for the stuff I do the web. Particularly given my previous adventures where in android stuff. For now I will ignore those little whisperings.

For now I plan to create a few website using google sites and see how it plays out.