Free Site Hosting Service Review Checked on May 13, 2001
http://www.virtualave.net
came as a sudden and pleasant surprise to me. Nothing like tracing
our readers links back from the old referer logs!
VirtualAve.net offers free hosting to both businesses and individuals,
but please be sure to read the service agreement first. There are some
(what I consider to be) reasonable exclusions. They provide both
yourname.virtualave.net and yourdomain.com free hosting.
Of course, if you decided to get your own domain, you are responsible
for the $70.00 InterNic Registration Fee.
They promise fast connectivity. As of this writing (November 21, 1998)
they sure do! Page retrieval, script execution, and FTP access are
quick. In fact, traceroutes from two different servers yielded results
under 30ms. Wow! (from Long Island, NY)
Be prepared to be a little self-sufficient. When I setup the test
account I could not run scripts due to a configuration error. I wrote
support, never heard from them, but it started working by the next
day. I do not fault them for this- half my e-mail are questions
regarding server configuration on fee based servers I have never
seen! Read the FAQs!
After gleaning a couple of tidbits out of the FAQs and the
welcome letter, I had the Virtual Card script up and
running in less than two minutes- and on the very first try.
To use their service, you have to agree to carry a banner on the top
of all pages- including CGI generated pages. In exchange for carrying
a standard size banner you get:
Real FTP access.
Unix Apache Server with everything just where it should be!
FAQ's are terse, but readable.
20MB storage space.
Full CGI and Perl abilities.
Server Side Includes (name your pages with the .shtml extention)
Porting BNB scripts is a snap!
The path to your HTML is: /home/login_name/public_html
The path to your CGI is: /home/login_name/public_html/cgi-bin
Replace any occurrance of "/usr/lib/sendmail -t" with
"/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"
The path to perl 5 (First line in a script) is /usr/local/bin/perl
Set your script permissions to 755 (owner-all, group and others
read-execute only)
Scripts that need to write to files require that the files
have their permissions set to 666 (read-write for all). Directories
such as cards, must have their permissions set to 777
(read-write-search for all).
DO NOT use environment variable such as DOCUMENT_ROOT, they
point elsewhere (at least with name.virtualave.net hosting)
Overall Impression:
Outstanding service and speed in trade for small real estate.
Technical support and the sign-up process can lag, but you get
what you pay for!
