Web Hosting Review: Budget Web Hosting at Talkspot.Com

Talkspot was, for a few years, the best-kept secret around in free web hosting. As of some point last year, however, they put a pretty drastic cap on free service - new sites made since then can only create a maximum of something like ten seperate pages (although there's apparently no limit to the size of each page.) It still works pretty well for small, free websites however, and sites that existed prior to the new policy were "grandfathered" in (like mine) and can continue to merrily suck up tons of bandwidth with as many new pages as we want. Honestly, I feel a little bad about that now, so I thought the least I could do (aside from paying for a yearly subscription, which my broke butt is working on) was to do a little write-up of the service, my experience with it, and why I think it's the best deal in hosting for the money right now.

So basically, if you pay $70 per year, you get everything that you got back when the site was free, and then some. You get unlimited storage space and pages and all that, but now you also get a .com domain name of your choosing, a lot more prefab design templates to choose from, a lot more prefab tools for creating things like shopping carts, and all sorts of blog-style "widgets" . $70 a year breaks down to about $5.85 or so per month, which is about what GoDaddy charges you for just a domain name reg, a couple of email addresses and maybe ten megabytes of storage space or so. Oh, and crap service. Talkspot does not have crap service. Quite the opposite.

Talkspot is actually run by Ken Williams (former head of Sierra On-Line for you classic PC gaming fans out there) and his son D.J., and at least one of them seems to be available almost constantly answering questions by e-mail and responding to posts on the forums. Their total website count is still in the tens of thousands, and I don't know if this level of personal contact will continue if the site gets up into the hundreds of thousands, but at the moment it is very nice. Getting an actual human being to communicate with in a timely fashion is an extreme rarity in budget hosting, much less to have the actual people running the show responding to you within a day or so of your query (even if you're a freeloader.)

The angle of approach that they take is that of ease of use. You're free to use FTP or a Web uploader to upload your own HTML and such, but they also let you create pages through a built-in WYSIWYG editor that somewhat resembles Microsoft Word. The editor has been steadily improved over the years, and I now find it easier to lay out a page than to enter the HTML code - and I've been doing HTML in Notepad since 1996! You can also "toggle" WYSIWYG at any time, so you can do the basic layout of the page and insert pictures easily with it, and then turn it off to insert Google Adsense or similar code snips. The only downside to the editor is that it can be a butt to load sometimes on a slow connection, but if you have reasonably fast broadband, it really is the way to go.

If you're not experienced at all with web design but want to create a page yourself, they also offer something like 100 templates now to start off with. These function sort of like the pre-fab templates in Blogger and Wordpress and similar services, complete with "widgets" you can add for different functionality. I don't run a shopping site, so I can't comment extensively on this, but they do seem to offer some sort of pre-fab "shopping cart" system as well. They also offer web consulting services through some sort of design team that they contract with, though you'd have to e-mail for pricing on that, I didn't see a reference to it on the site anywhere.

The site encourages you to build a free page with them to check everything out, and then if it works for you, you can subscribe to gain the extra space and extra features. If not, hey, you haven't lost anything but a little time. Free sites made at Talkspot also have no advertising forced on them, although you are free to put in your own ads as you see fit.

http://talkspot.com/