1. Free hosting
   1. Advantages of free hosting
   2. Disadvantages of free hosting
   3. For blogs, the best known are : Skyrock and Wordpress
      1. Skyrock (formerly Skyblog)
      2. WordPress
   4. For forums, the best known are : Forumactif and Xooit
      1. Forumactif
      2. Xooit
   5. And finally, for custom websites : Lescigales.org
      1. Lescigales.org
2. Paid hosting
   1. Advantages of paid hosting
   2. Disadvantages of paid hosting
   3. The one we used, and we recommend : LWS.fr

1. Free hosting

1.1. Advantages of free hosting

• The accommodation does not cost you seen anything that is free. So no need to try to find a way to pay for your site, it is also generally forbidden for the free offers.
• Practice to begin or to host a site or a personal blog.
• Your domain is usually directly functional in the sense that it is a subdomain of "my_website.hoster_domain.com" type and not "my_website.com" or "my_website.net". So we do not have to wait 24 hours, until the DNS propagation takes place.
• The accommodation is simplified because you do not need to handle everything related to the fields, to make payments online to renew your hosting, ...
• For blogs, forums only : A simple interface is encoded by the host, so you avoid the concerns of programming languages ​​such as HTML, PHP, SQL, ...
• For blogs, forums only : No need to worry about security vulnerabilities because it is the host that is responsible for updating the scripts used. Eg : Wordpress or their own system for blogs, PHPbb and its variants for forums, ...
• Following types of free they afford not to be limited in terms of the total size of the forum hosts ... This is the case of blog hosting and free only forums. Other hosts limit the total size for you then migrate to a pay offer.

1.2. Disadvantages of free hosting

• Mainly advertising (+ or - following invasive hosts). This technique is the main reason that these hosts is free because you have to go to the money one way or another to support the servers hosting customer sites.
• A free host may well disappear without warning and you can lose your site (if you have not kept back at home) as well as its ranking in search engines (eg Google, Bing, ...) and web sites where you spoke.
• All free hosts are not serious. This can cause you to have viruses on your site because of the host itself or attack that it has received and which has contaminated all the sites hosted by them. This is also the case with Tripod (which was at one time at Lycos). The evidence on Google.
• You are the most limited in the size of your site time of your MySQL databases (if the host gives you the ability to create), and sometimes other levels following hosts.
• Some hosts provide the ability to create dynamic sites (with PHP mainly) but others do not.

Note : If you change provider at a time, do not delete the account from the old free hosting but do a redirect from the old to the new to avoid loss of visitors. The best way is to remove your entire site on the old host and place a ". Htaccess" file in the root to perform a 301 redirect to the new accommodation.

1.3. For blogs, the best known are : Skyrock and Wordpress

1.3.1. Skyrock (formerly Skyblog)

Skyrock.com is long and allows you to create your blog for free and unlimited. So you can publish as many articles (with or without images) you want without size limit.

WordPress

WordPress is a free service but with the distinction of being Opensource. So you can either have a free blog host via the site "Wordpress.com" or download the script on Wordpress "Wordpress.org" and thus install a free or paid hosting.

Each solution has its advantages and disadvantages

• If you choose the site "WordPress.com", you can publish an unlimited number of items (like Twitter), but the downside is that you do not have direct access to the database and can not therefore keep a backup in case the site would disappear.
• So if you choose the site "WordPress.org" you will certainly limited by the size of the FTP server specified by your provider (according to the offer you have selected on this one) but at least you can keep a backup of the database of your articles. The advantage is that if the host disappears you can easily republish this what your articles on your new host and that in a short time and without changing the dates of publication of your articles.

For information, this CMS is also well used by professionals as individuals :

• Individuals use it mainly to create a blog without having to write any code
• Traders use to improve their particular prodution (for web developers) but also to create plugins and / or themes for users of the CMS

1.4. For forums, the best known are : Forumactif and Xooit

1.4.1. Forumactif

Forumactif allow you to create your forum for free and unlimited. So you can publish as many posts as you like and without size limit. It also provides free hosting for your images accessible from your forum but hosted on another domain. Namely : Servimg.com.
They also give you the ability to use the famous script "phpBB" version 2 and 3 but also alternatives such as : punBB and Invision.

1.4.2. Xooit

Xooit also allows you to create your forum for free and unlimited. But we recommend you "Forumotion" because the interface is much more simple and functional as Xooit.

1.5. And finally, for custom websites : Lescigales.org

1.5.1. Lescigales.org

Lescigales.org is the only free from those we tested provide a free hosting without advertising and quality hosting. You obviously can not put ads on your site because it's a free service. Your site can not be either for commercial purposes if it's automatically locked.

2. Paid hosting

2.1. Advantages of paid hosting

• Technical support is closer to its customers with a free hosting. This logic.
• No ads
• Allows you to host a professional website and / or commercial
• Paid hosting will disappear, in general, not without telling its customers. Obviously it depends on the host but if you choose a known host, this rule should be correct.
• You are less limited in storage (for both the FTP server databases if applicable). These limitations obviously vary depending on the hosts and offers made by them.
• Possibility of daily backups. (May vary hosts and offers)
• The host manages the better security of their servers because as each customer pays an accommodation, the host must do everything to satisfy its customers and prevent them from leaving to another. They can also hire the best staff to handle technical problems, security vulnerabilities, ...
• Some hosts also provide space known scripts or features already programmed on your accommodation. These services are sometimes free and sometimes paid following hosts.
• You can create what you want (as long as your site is legal of course) and create your site why not : a forum, a blog, guestbook, ... In the context of a professional website, you may need to know PHP. For this, we recommend you to read the site during the zero created for beginners.

2.2. Disadvantages of paid hosting

• It pays. We must therefore try to make it profitable in one way or another. For example, using advertising agencies.
• It is better to try to understand what a domain, transfer domain, DNS zones, ... because there are often rules to follow. Ex : A domain transfer can not be done if it is expired, it was created or renewed there less than 60 days, ...
• Do not forget to renew your hosting and your domain name. Ex : An expired domain may be stolen, a bitter period of redemption, a robot that automatically acquires domain names that are expiring at the second.
• It usually wait 24 hours after ordering hosting for your domain name is registered and DNS propagation takes place.

2.3. The one we used, and we recommend : LWS.fr

The only one that can advise you as paying host is "LWS.fr" because we and many of our knowledge at home and never have to worry about them. For the moment, we call several times the support of this host to transfer our domain name with them (because they are also registrar but all hosts do not) and we always have them accurate answers for us to do the best. For info, it often happens that it makes promotions for its accommodation offers.

LWS has a main site offering the accommodation offers a forum that allows for free technical support and a wiki to help you manage your hosting (Web Linux or Windows VPS Web)

• Main site : LWS.fr
• Forum : Forum.LWS-hosting.com
• Wiki : Wiki.LWS-hosting.com