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Bravenet Web Services offers dozens of free services to web masters including site rings, guest books, password protection, forums, email, hit counters, and search engines. The
process is very simple: you select the service and they present you with the HTML code to cut and paste into your pages. You may have to put up with some advertising with some features but
if you are good at editing HTML you can get rid of it.
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DirectNIC is a domain name registrar. They perform all that functions the Network Solutions did/does except they do it for
$15 per year (as opposed to $70 for two years). Plus they offer a bunch of other free services such as URL redirection (i.e., www.yourname.com is automatically redirected to
your freebie site at www.Members.AOL.Com/~ydol328/index.htm), email forwarding, etc.
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FreeFind offers a free site search engine (it only indexes your site, not the entire web). They reindex your site once a month
and provide all sorts of reporting (e.g., what pages are being hit, what phrases are being searched for). You can provide your own HTML page template for the results or use their
default one. It is limited to 50 pages and monthly reindex, so if you need more then you can use their fee-based service.
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GeoCities started out as an alternative to AOL but was quickly gobbled up by Yahoo. What was left was a really neat free web
host with only minor ads (which actually disappear after a few minutes). You must first sign up with Yahoo Mail (see below) and then register with GeoCities. Choose
your Yahoo ID well since that will become the address of your GeoCities web site. They offer both FTP and web-based file transfer and 20MB of space, which is a whole lot unless you are big
into MP3 or graphics. They also offer step-by-step web page creation or you can do it on your own and upload the pages.
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Need a secure way to send and/or receive money through the web? PayPal is my service of choice. Registration is free. There is no surcharge for sending or receiving money for an individual (businesses pay a fairly nominal fee to receive money). It can be set up to use a checking account or credit card.
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WS-FTP LE is a Windows-based File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program for transferring files from your PC to an
FTP site, normally your web host. The "LE" stands for "Light" or "Limited" edition (I'm not sure which). It is the slightly less powerful version of WS-FTP Pro which costs about $39 but the
"LE" version is free. I have used both and actually prefer the free one ... it is a little easier to use.
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OK, we all know and love Yahoo as a search engine. But did you know it also offers free web-based Yahoo!Mail? It
is a very robust email service. You can do virtually everything you would do with Eudora or Outlook. You can even have it automatically check up to 3 external POP3 email accounts (this
means you can probably check your home email at work!). Any where in the world that you can get on the Internet, you can now get your mail.
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ZoneAlarm is a firewall program that protects your computer from attacks through your cable or DSL modem. There is a free version (which I use) and a more advanced version for $40. I have an article on firewalls that goes into the issue in detail. |
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