Archbob — Sun, 03 Feb 2002 05:53:28 +0000

redirection does hurt pagerank. Domain hosting is much better. Spacetowns offer domain hosting for free but you have to put up with a user-placable top banner ad.

1lit.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2002 20:15:12 +0000

Good point. I read about that little trick in the trafficology newsletter. However, I've already got various pages from Geocities/Tripod feeding to my main site; I thought having links from a more 'reputable' webhost which have more value at Google.

Also, many search engine bots don't list or give much prominence to Geocities/Tripod pages.

Finally, these 'feeder' sites are promoted heavily, so I don't want to lose any of the traffic to the very prominent Geocities/Tripod ads.

Thanks for the input.

mjames — Sat, 02 Feb 2002 16:24:43 +0000

Why can't you just use GeoCities or Tripod if all it is going to do for you is increase your PageRank by linking to your actual site? Whether or not you have ads on there won't affect your marketing efforts. And it doesn't really matter as you won't be really using this site.

1lit.com — Sat, 02 Feb 2002 12:52:42 +0000

Thank you very much for kindly providing the links.

I realise that you're not going to get a state-of-the-art package included in the price of a domain name.

However, you should try to look at it from my perspective:

All I want is an ad-free host where I can place a one or two page Web site. This will essentially be a 'feeder' page for my main Web site. Because it is on a different host, it will increase my link popularity.

The amount of bandwith or other features provided is irrelevant. This will be a low traffic mini-site.

Not all of us have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing (then again most of those companies that did went bust)! People like me have to creative in drawing traffic to my site: use brains rather than dollars, because I don't have unlimited amounts of the latter.

My creative techniques might not be as glamorous as billboard ads, but they have enabled me to build and promote one of my sites to the status of the fourth biggest movie site in the UK. Within six months it has better link popularity at Google than sites with a thousand times more resources and twenty times more staff. It now draws tens of thousands of visits a month - on next to no marketing expenditure

Thank once again for your advice

Archbob — Sat, 02 Feb 2002 03:36:49 +0000

catalog gives you a crappy package if you transfer or register with them.

phenominet.com gives you a free domain name and good hosting for $60/year.

Brian Farkas — Sun, 20 Jan 2002 19:02:18 +0000

I'm not aware of any web hosts that offer this, but I'm fairly confident that even if there ARE hosts that offer this, you're going to have a very hard time finding a reliable one.

If you're registering a domain through them, that's what, about $25/year? I know of hosts that will purchase a DOMAIN for you if you sign up for their service on an annual contract, but not the other way around. You might consider signing up on a free host like hypermart.com, as they make money through banner ads placed on your web site. But an ad-free site for $1.67/month? Well... you get what you pay for.

Good luck,

Brian Farkas