Hosted With.Us is a free web hosting that vies you 100GB of storage and 100GB of monthly bandwidth absolutely free. If that sounds too good to be true, here's the catch: You have to include a Hosted With.Us footer on any web page you create. That wouldn't be so bad, but the footer includes an absolutely obnoxious advertisement. You know, those ads that ask if you'd like to meet lonely girls living in your neighborhood? Yeah, that's what popped up when we built our test site. And while it's possible the ads rotate, we kept getting that same annoying ad over and over.

If you can live with the ads, Hosted.With.Us does deliver on its promise. While most free web hosts like Blogger, LiveJournal, or WordPress give you a limited set of tools for creating and managing a web page, Hosted With.Us gives you all the tools you'd need to build a professional looking web site. You can associate your account with any Domain name or use the username.hostedwith.us name that comes with your account. And users can upload and modify files via FTP or a web interface. You can install a WordPress blog, a forum, or pretty much anything else you'd like.

The service does let you do away with the footer altogether for $2.95 per month, or $1.95 per month if you pay for 6 months in advance.

[via NoHeat]

If you were a large company that subsists on customers paying monthly or yearly subscription fees, what's the worst possible thing you could do? While a number of things come to mind, automatically billing customers for a year in advance by mistake has to come in at the top. Now, how about when you're a hosting company that has a reputation for being a little too casual, a little bit unprofessional?

Yikes.

Today is not a good day for DreamHost.

Last night a mistake was made that caused virtually every single DreamHost customer to be billed for a full year of hosting up until December 2008. This caused automated charges to be processed against these customer's credit card or other accounts from a few hundred dollars, to literally thousands of dollars. By their own admission, this was a $7.5M mistake. Seven and a half million dollars.

Calling that a mistake is an understatement. The right term starts with the word "cluster" and ends with something that's not printable here.

Given that DreamHost has a bit of a PR issue in that their cool and casual reputation is starting to look a little juvenile and irresponsible, how would you expect them to respond? Probably not with "Um, whoops," but that's exactly what they responded with.

Double Yikes.

DreamHost, it's time to grow up. The cool kid or class clown loses his charm when it becomes clear he's just a screwup.

Whenever you go to purchase something online, do you pause when you come across a field for a coupon code or promo code, and think "I need to find one!". Us too. Well, it turns out that if you're going to sign up for a hosting account with Dreamhost, it's really, really easy to find a promo code just by doing a quick search. There actually seems to be millions of them!

It turns out that any Dreamhost customer can create their own promo code to help sign up new customers, and receive a kickback. It all seems too good to be true, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation behind it. So if you're in the market for some web hosting, and you're planning on using Dreamhost, make sure to read this article at Hosting Fu explaining Dreamhost's promo code scheme first.

Customers of the LA based web hosting company Media Temple just got access to a special account center designed especially for the iPhone.

This new Media Temple iPhone AccountCenter web hosting control panel allows Apple iPhone users to:

• Buy a domain
• Rebooth a server
• Add emails
• Pay bills
• Get support

Now how much more convenience can you get from your web hosting provider? Unfortunately you just have to dish out the $600 for an iPhone, and a few extra dollars for a monthly plan and you're all set to manage your hosting account from anywhere.

Some exciting news has come down from the DivShare front. They are offering a chance for users to upgrade for free to the newly formed DivShare Direct plan.

Divshare is an online storage platform. Users can upload images, video and audio files, and have a direct link to them, as well as an embed code for insertion into social networks, websites, or blogs. The DivShare Direct plan lets users place their logo on Flash videos that have been uploaded, on audio players, and on slideshows. Uploading content will be increased to 2GB, with direct links to files, meaning no download pages to go through first. Each Direct plan will also have a special FTP account to upload all content with unlimited storage and bandwidth.

The special DivShare promotion will start tonight at midnight ET, and will be free for a month. What a nice way to temp us to upgrade. After the first month period is over the price goes up to $4.95/month, all the way up to $49.45/month depending on the account options.

With lots of competition in the market for online storage of images, text, audio, video, OneDump enters and tries to sneak in with a simplistic approach.

OneDump offers free unlimited storage for all types of files, from audio, images, and text, but what makes them different is their straightforward approach that makes it easier to upload and share files. OneDump not only lets users host files but it also lets you link to them to use on social networks, websites and blogs. The OneDump Quicksend method open to registered users allows them to directly upload images, audio and text files by sending them as email attachments, this also includes files sent from mobile devices.

Service drawbacks, you can only upload 10 files at once, with a 5MB cap on each. With a lot of competition out there, look at other image storing sites look to DivShare, PirateBay, AllYouCanUpload, Flickr, or this link that contains a list of 50 other services that host files from 10mb to 20mb, with no registration, no file size limit, and no download limit or file life.

There are a lot of file sharing/hosting/storing sites out there. A lot. So one of my first predictable questions for DivShare co-founder David Altschul was of course, "Why use DivShare?" His answer: "DivShare sets itself apart from other free file hosts in a number of distinct ways, most notably in that we offer unlimited uploads and downloads, no waiting lines for files, auto image galleries, no popups or spam, an intuitive member dashboard, and all files stay online forever. Perhaps the biggest reason why bloggers and webmasters should choose DivShare over the other free file hosts is our co-branding options. Blogs can quickly and easily add their name, URL and logo to their hosted file pages via the dashboard. An example of co-branding can be seen here (warning: the link may also start a download - you can cancel it - but it's actually a pretty good song).

I have to admit, everything David says sounds great (files stay online forever?!). But how does it actually perform? Well, the aforementioned song downloaded at an average rate of 550KBps, which isn't bad at all. I uploaded a 10MB video, and though there's no fancy Flash-Ajax upload timer, it took less than 2 minutes to complete. On an upstream-weak cable connection, that's pretty darn good. Since DivShare launched this month, only time will tell if the service remains as excellent as it is right now. Happy uploading!

P.S. You can't upload files larger than 100MB.

Files-Upload will let you upload up to a 1GB file unlimited times and unlimited storage on their site, and you can do it using your favorite FTP program. The catch here is that your files will only be retained for 6 months since the last download of that file. If you don't feel like downloading files every six months, you will lose files. Files-Upload offers a free subdomain "myname.files-upload.com" for easy access to those files. There is also a web interface to upload files if you want, but hey who wouldn't want to use FTP for most things? Either way, and even with the 6 month half-life of your files, FREE is a hard price to beat to only have to do a re-download every 6 months to keep them alive. Worth it, don't you think?

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup SQLyog (community edition) for exporting/importing (substitute: phpMyAdmin)
• 1 tsp. favorite FTP client (FileZilla, CuteFTP, WSFTP, CoffeeCup, iFTP)
• 1 whole fresh WordPress install, unzipped and ready to upload (get it here)
• 1 new host (Dreamhost is a good host)
• 30 mins to complete
• a dash of know-how (provided below)

WordPress (WP) is a piece of cake to install, but what if you need to move a WP install to another host, and you don't want to deal with your posts being all wonky and your links weird? You can try using the import function of WP, but I found it to be very hard to work 100% and give you exactly what you had before. Below is a way to get your exact blog back, almost exactly what you had at your old host. The only requirement is that your new hosting environment be somewhat similar (similar version of PHP and MySQL).

I suppose this would be a WP hack, and isn't the way WordPress says to do it, but in my experience, the WP way to import doesn't give you exactly identically what you had before (especially with templates). My way does. So you're ready to bake your first WP turnovers? Great. If you are sick of the old host you are now using, they don't have enough features, or you just plain got a better deal, here's how to move your WP install over to your new host.

Instructions:

Step 1: Use SQLyog or phpMyAdmin to backup your entire database. You should also go into WP and use the backup plug-in to make a copy of the site itself (preferably offline and somewhere safe).

Step 2: Next, use your favorite FTP client and connect to your old host, where your site currently lives. You'll need to copy your theme files, especially if you have made any custom hacks to them. If you don't copy them out, you'll not have them when you move your site. WP newbie tip: All theme files reside in www.yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/themename. That is the folder you want to copy. If you have multiple themes, copy all you want to end up on your new host. I would copy them to your hard-drive, then later we'll put them back. You can copy the whole themes folder if you want, no big deal.

Step 3: You must also copy any theme files you have that you want to keep. These live in www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins. Copy the whole plug-ins folder for later.

Step 4: FTP to your new server. If you don't already have the WP software in a zip file, you'll need to download it here. Once downloaded, unzip it, and upload it to your new server via FTP.

Step 5: Install WP like you are setting up a new site. Create a new database, or use an existing one but be sure that the tablenames (table prefix) is exactly what it was on your old host during WP install. Once the new WordPress install is complete, now comes the fun part.

Step 6: Export your WP tables (or the whole database) that pertains to your WP blog from your old host. I generally use SQLyog community edition and export just my WP tables into a "textfile.sql" file on my hard drive.

Step 7: Go to your new host's MySQL database (just created with the new WP install process), and delete the new tables from the database.

Step 8: Use SQLyog to import your textfile.sql file into the new host's MySQL database.

Step 9: Simply FTP all your theme files and plug-ins to your new host's folders. The locations are exactly the same as your previous host (besides the root directory).

Step 10: Lastly, be sure you manually go into your sidebar, header, and any other files in your template and change anything you may have hard-coded to the old host. Most WP users don't have that problem unless they have custom hacks in place.

Hot tip: If you use AJAX, lightbox, and some other special add-ons that are not plug-ins, it is a good idea to let them reside in your theme folder, so if you move that theme, all the cool effects and special hacks go with the theme you're using. Makes things easy.

As long as your old tablenames match the new tablenames (that were installed by WP), your new host will fool your blog into thinking that it still lives with all the same data at the old host, but everything will point to the new host. This is part of the underlying structure of WP, and this makes the blog act like nothing changed, though you are duplicating the files and moving the physical location somewhere else. This act of splicing your WP install into another one you have created give you the ability to get exactly what you had before. Beware that this may not work, I obviously don't have every configuration and system out there. All of the moves I have tried using this method have worked flawlessly, and I have highly hacked and modified installs, so it should work for almost everyone.

WordPress.com, the free blog hosting service from the creators of open source blogging software WordPress, has announced a new hosting package for high-profile, high-traffic bloggers. WordPress.com VIP Hosting "allows these folks to piggyback on our WordPress.com infrastructure, getting the benefits of what we've built without the limitations of a free WordPress.com account around theme editing and javascript." It provides load-balancing across WordPress.com's many servers, SSL administration, Subversion access for template editing, the ability to use WordPress plugins that don't require database table modifications, and no limitations on JavaScript or advertising. The service allows users to have their own domain names (rather than example.wordpress.com), but requires a "Powered by WordPress.com" logo. Currently WordPress.com is only courting "existing high-profile publishers or startups" that it has "a good deal of confidence in," and the price reflects that: $250 per month with a one-time $500 setup fee.

[Via Matt Mullenweg]

Wikidot is providing free webhosting to wiki sites and social networks using an AJAX interface. Wikidot launched in August when the developers were looking for a free wiki to host a software project. The service generates income by ads, premium features and partnerships. Wikidot's service is easy to set-up with some great features including:

• sitename.wikidot.com - nice clean domain
• create and edit pages quickly
• invite people to edit pages
• 100 MB storage
• RSS feeds
• RSS exports

The Wikidot service can also be used as a personal homepage, or a spot to store data that can be accessed from anywhere without knowing any coding or html.

LeeAnn Prescott from web analysis company Hitwise has an interesting article on her blog about the market shares of the web's most popular photo sharing and hosting sites. While it's true that Flickr gets most of the buzz, it turns out it's not at the top of the heap-it's at #6. Prescott isn't clear on how they measure market share (trade secret, I'm sure), but by Hitwise's count Photobucket leads by an enormous margin over Yahoo! Photos, CNet's Webshots, Kodakgallery.com (formerly Ofoto), ImageShack, and finally Flickr. Interestingly the primary source of traffic for ImageShack, Photobucket and recent startup Slide (at #9) are all-you guessed it-MySpace. Apparently 1.39% of all photo traffic from MySpace goes to Photobucket, and Prescott hypothesizes that MySpace itself could be the reason for Photobucket's surge in market share. Prescott's post is an interesting look at how social networking sites are fueling the photo-hosting market.

Google is currently testing a new version of its photo-management app Picasa in private beta that will let users post photo albums on the web via an integrated, Google-hosted service. You can learn some more about the service or put yourself on the beta waiting list at the Picasa Web site. Rafe Needleman at CNet's Web 2.0 Blog has posted a quick review of the functionality. He says at first blush the Picasa integration is quite good and publishing albums "couldn't be simpler." Galleries have nice, human-readable URLs, albums' design is clean and easy to navigate, and other Picasa users can import your photos into Picasa if you allow it. However Needleman identifies a few "snags," including the lack of password-protection for albums you want to keep private and the mysterious absence of captions. His biggest complaint is the lack of synchronization between Picasa and Picasa Web: Once you've uploaded an album, changes to images, titles, etc. in Picasa don't transfer over. He's also unsatisfied with the amount of storage space--only 250MB for free accounts compared to Gmail's 2.7GB+. For $25/year you can get 6GB of storage, but Needleman doesn't think that's a good value, and I'd have to agree. Though he isn't overly impressed with Picasa Web's feature set, he does say, "I don't know of a simpler or faster way to share photos." If you want to see what Picasa Web's online albums look like, take a look at the demo gallery.

AllYouCanUpload is a new image hosting site from CNet's Webshots. Unlike Webshots, it's in the ImageShack/PhotoBucket camp, intended not for browsing like Flickr, but for hosting photos and images to be used on other web sites. Like ImageShack, AllYouCanUpload is a free, no-login service and the upload form is right on the front page, and the service is completely devoid of advertising. There are no file size limits and no limit on total storage of number of images uploaded. Its most notable feature, though, is that there are no bandwidth constraints, so if you upload a file that becomes immensely popular, it won't get taken down as with some other services. That feature is by no means unique to AllYouCanUpload, but it's nice to see. Like ImageShack, once you upload an image you have to hang on to the URL or you'll never get it back. If you're interested in such things, CNet's Martin Green writes a bit about the service, and CNet's new "Haystack" back-end storage system, in his blog.  Now, how long before ImageBot will work with it?

[Via TechCrunch]

Have a bunch of spare bandwidth and an extra computer or two? Ever think of using them to start your own web hosting company? HowtoForge has a tidy how-to on setting up shared web hosting using Ubuntu Linux. It's pretty straightforward and naturally uses only free software, but as with most Linux tutorials there's a fair amount of editing config files and typing into terminals. It will, however, get you from zero (installing Ubuntu) to finished in an afternoon.