TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
Some FWPs have millions of members and are continuing to
grow at an explosive rate. Free webpages are a hot commodity right
now, and many FWPs can't keep up with the demand. Therefore, technical
difficulties are common among FWPs. Performance
is often a concern; bandwidth and server CPU cycles can easily be eaten up
by too many visitors. To keep up with demand, FWPs must upgrade their
servers, which results in downtime.
In comparison, paid hosting companies have much better
performance and less downtime. Some hosting companies boast
significant uptime. These companies have more revenue from users so they
can upgrade their systems faster. It's worth paying to have a reliable
website.
NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY
FWPs have gotten a reputation of hosting mediocrity.
Many of the pages hosted by FWPs are "personal homepages", which often
contain little or no content. As such, many outsiders don't take FWP-hosted sites seriously. Some search engines and award sites don't
bother considering FWP-hosted sites at all. Getting a GeoCities site
listed, for example, is virtually impossible on some search engines.
SYSTEM ABUSES
FWP accounts are free and easy to obtain. In many
cases it's possible to obtain one with a fake name and email address.
Because of this, FWP "throwaway" accounts can be used by shady
characters for questionable purposes.
Porno and warez are common. Many FWP accounts are
used to store pornography and warez (pirated software and music). While
all FWPs ban porn and warez, it still pops up frequently. There's so much
of a demand for this stuff that no one can stop it. Porn and warez are bad for FWPs because they eat up a tremendous amount of space
and, mostly importantly, suck up vast quantities of bandwidth. A FWP
loaded with porn becomes deluged with countless employees surfin' smut on
company time. This slows the FWP down for all users.
TaoTree put this message on its homepage a few months ago:
We regret to report that we are being attacked by what appears to be
several individuals who incessantly attempt to host pornographic content
on our servers. We have attempted to notify the parties that this was
unacceptable, but in vain. Until we can put in place a way to screen for
this, we will not be able to process new signups for free web space. We
hope to put a solution in place soon, but we do not know how soon it
will be.
Pornographers and "warez d00dz" ruin things for everyone.
Spam (unsolicited
commercial email, or UCE) is a significant problem for FWPs that offer
email accounts. "Throwaway" email accounts are used by
unscrupulous spammers to send mass mailings. When the FWP finds out and
terminates the account, the spammer moves on to another free account. This
places a huge demand on the FWP's mail servers, causing performance to
degrade for everyone. Since spam is prohibited by all FWP and free email
providers, spammers in effect 'steal' bandwidth and CPU cycles from them.
This is just plain wrong. Unfortunately, there is no clear way to solve
this problem.
Security breaches. Since FWPs are public accessible,
they are vulnerable to cracker attacks. Any server connected to the Net is
vulnerable in some fashion.
OTHER COMMON REASONS
 | Slow site response - thousands of site on one server. |
| Slow setup - too many sites to set up. |
| Lack of HTML control - built in editors of FWP limit you. |
| FrontPage extension errors - if it breaks it will probably take
weeks to fix. |
| Who owns the site - some FWPs have argued they have copyright of a
free site.
Yahoo and Geocities. |
| Annoying pop-ups. |
| No chance of getting listed in the search engines. |
| Stats, email, FTP, and subdomain limitations. |
| Lack of privacy and security. |
