Life’s easy for bloggers. Adding posts is a breeze, placing ads is simple and it doesn’t matter which blogging service you use, all the best ones are free.

If only the same were true for website owners.

Sure, a basic hosting package won’t cost you a fortune but when money’s tight and you’re not sure whether the site will bring in any revenue, even seeing five bucks drop out of your account each month can feel pretty painful.

There are alternatives of course, and there’s no shortage of companies offering free hosting packages. Usually though, you get what you pay for: irritating banner ads, poor customer service, limitations on scripting and uploading, and worst of all, a sub-domain URL that reveals right away that you’re too poor to pay a hosting fee.

But with a bit of care, it is possible to get your website online without paying a dime. Here are some of the best options:

DigitalSpace
A good place to look for free hosting services is free-webhosts.com which has a long list of free services, complete with features, reviews, feedback and grades.

Perhaps most interesting of all though is the site’s affiliate deals with hosting services. The deal with Digital Space, for example, provides an entire year of free hosting. You’ll need a credit card to register and provided you don’t cancel, when the first year ends, you’ll be charged $6.95 per month.

That does however, give you a year risk-free to see if your site idea works and how quickly it will cover the hosting fee.

AgilityHoster
On the other hand, if you want a hosting service that starts free and stays free, one of the best services might be AgilityHoster. Their simplest package costs nothing, allows 200 MB of disk space, contains no ads and lets you use your domain name.

The only downside is one that affects pretty much all free services: there’s no SMTP mail service.

That’s to stop spammers loading up on free hosts and pumping out emails. It could be a bit of an inconvenience but not the end of the world.

AwardSpace
AwardSpace appears to be another reliable, cost-free option. Again, there’s no SMTP service, but you still get a couple of domains, five email addresses, a MySQL database and 10 MB of database storage space. What you don’t get though are access and error logs, shared SSL, shopping carts, 24/7 customer support and a whole bunch of other things you might find useful.

Google’s Pages
DigitalSpace, AgilityHoster and AwardSpace are all conventional hosting services that hold your website, but another option is to place your site on Google’s servers.

Google’s Page Creator is a very simple way to get a website online in no time at all and for no money at all either.

The service works in much the same way as a blog: you can choose from a range of templates, add pages, play with layout, and insert text and images with a user-friendly WYSIWYG editor.

The limitations are pretty severe though. You only get 100 MB storage space and absolutely none of the bells and whistles that any paid (and even some of the free) service will give you.

And your URL will be http://yourname.googlepages.com.

If all you want to do is upload text and the odd image — for a proposal or lesson plan, for example — it could be a good choice. If you’re hoping to put across a business face, then you’ll need a whole other option.

Squidoo
And that whole other option might be Squidoo.

This is nothing like a blog and it’s nothing like a traditional website either. Instead, it’s an opportunity to portray yourself as an expert on one particular field.

You’ll get one page with a choice of modules and plenty of room for text. Ads are included but you’ll get a share of the revenue.

It’s clearly not going to be an option for anyone who wants even the basic functionality that comes with a website — such as your own domain, email, databases and so on — but if all you want from a website is the opportunity to promote yourself and your expertise then it could be a useful option, especially as you’ll be able to enjoy some of the site’s traffic.

In fact, it could even be a good complement to your own website on a good, free hosting service…

mugley

With just about every hosting service now promising 99 percent uptime, you’ve just got to wonder what happens during the other 1 percent.

Here are some of the freakiest things that have brought down web hosts.

How Moving Vehicles can obliterate your Website
Rackspace is a very popular company specializing in datacenter operation. They host some of the most popular websites on the internet. They offer the famous 100% uptime guarantee, which has attracted website giants such as Motorola, 37 Signals, and Laughing Squid. Rackspace was even voted as one of the most reliable hosts- year after year.

What Rackspace can’t stop is the force of a moving truck power-driving into a transformer. As the transformer blew, so did the electricity. Rackspace was apparently caught at a bad time, as the back-up generators were lacking the proper cooling needed to sustain power. The back-up generators were eventually pulled offline, and a slew of websites came down with them.

Web hosts can protect against denial of service attacks, hacking attempts, and common security vulnerabilities- but they just can’t compare to the force of a moving truck.

Mother Nature Rears her Ugly Head
A truck isn’t that bad. If we were determined enough, we could surround our datacenter and necessary utilities with a 30 foot wall of cement. We would still be vulnerable to the fierce force of Mother Nature, who took out the ServerBeach datacenter in Virginia.

In this case, a power outage caused the ServerBeach datacenter to go into generator mode- much like Rackspace. And also like Rackspace, ServerBeach had problems with getting their air conditioning units online. As the temperatures quickly rose in the datacenter, the entire supply of servers had to be immediately shut down to save everything.

The utility company did manage to bring electricity back online- which led us all to question: do any of the air conditioning units in datacenters actually work?

Things Tend to Catch Fire

It probably wasn’t possible mentioning web hosting nightmares without also mentioning Dreamhost. Dreamhost is rather famous for multiple outages, covering a broad spectrum of reasons. What’s more exciting than a good campfire in the datacenter?

Apparently when generators catch fire, websites start to go down. And not just a few- a good number of customers suddenly realized maybe a fire-prone datacenter isn’t the best kind to invest in. Dreamhost didn’t get any slack- negative customer feedback flooded their blog as the story was unfolding.

Who can blame them? It seems if datacenters aren’t catching fire these days, they are getting attacked by trucks or lightning storms.

A Look to the Future
If you haven’t heard, Japan is investigating alternative placement of datacenters. Their best idea yet: abandoned coal mines. Apparently placing a datacenter in an abandoned coal mine is estimated to save millions in electricity costs annually.

We’re all a fan of saving electricity- and even a fan of keeping datacenters away from truck drivers. But we aren’t so keen on the idea of what’s next. Think about it; the next time your website goes down could be because of a coal mine collapse. Or even perhaps a bit of underground pollution clogged the ventilation system in the server room- either way it sounds like recovery time will be a little longer than normal.

Who’s Safe?
No one is safe from being exterminated from the internet. If major corporations can fall to the vehicle accident, thunderstorm, fire, mine collapse- you name it- then you won’t fare any better. Your best bet? Follow Google’s example and invest in as many datacenter locations as needed- after all, how many coincidences can happen across multiple locations spanning the entire world?

And even then, we are all subject to the occasional conspiracy.