I am not going to name, names; but you may be reading this on one of the new breed of internet money makers. The free webspace provider. Some of these, Geocities and Tripod are quite reliable. Others are quasi-reliable, like Xoom and Fortune City, but are very slow. Lastly, some are completely unreliable ( Theglobe.scum for instance ), but still have every cookie and pop-up window in the known universe, to hawk their worthless service!

The reliable ones always seem to have pop-up windows and cookies. The reason for this is advertisement. These providers cannot exist without income ( what, you thought they were altruistic and out to help people get their message on the internet, yeah right ). These guys make money every time someone clicks on one of their banner or pop-up window ads. They encourage you to advertise your website on the popular search engines, but you are really advertising them. Some search engines will not even take submissions from these providers ( like Infoseek only takes links from The Globe via email submission ).

Others have paid hosting sections and advertise this through their free webspace victims. Yes, more often than not, we are the ones getting taken advantage of and not taking advantage of their wonderful offer of free space for our projects. Make no bones about it, if they were not garnering money from hosting people's self made advertising for them, they wouldn't be offering the space!

Many of these providers advertise grandios communities with subject flavors sections and the lure of meeting folks with the same interests. This is still a front, for you to attract more ' surfers ' to make them money by clicking the ads.

The banner ads themselves can often be part of the problem of slowness. If they put these ads on every page, and not just the index; then their processor is always busy.

Hard drive space can also be a problem with some of the fly by night free servers. Many sites are operating on very old hand-me-down obsolete computers with slow processors and hard drives measured in megabytes and not gigabytes. Some seem like they are residing in an employee's den and slow down ( or go completely dead ) while the guy is busy playing computer games!

A big problem with some of these, is the chat room. They offer these to attract more possible banner ad clickers, but they take up a lot of processor power and bandwith, thus slowing everything down a bunch!

A problem with many of these providers, is sporadic FTP service ( or none at all ). The more free accounts they accept, the more people are trying to upload files at the same time. Some limit the number of connections, so you have to keep trying over and over again, until you finally get connected. Others just don't care and let you log in, just to have the connection time out! If you have a daily updated website, this can get very frustrating and time consuming. If you have a website that will be updated infrequently, this may not bother you, until you have something you really want to upload and find yourself wasting time waiting for a window of opportunity.

Another problem is online webpage editors. They take up computing power and slow down the entire system. It is unfortunately understandable, as these providers are trying to encourage people who can't program html, to create new pages to advertise their provider and make money advertising other products through the banner ads.

Web-based email accounts have become popular, but also take up processor power and slow things down. These accounts allow spammers to have semi-anonymous addresses to conceal their true identities. Spam is another story.

Some ( a very few ) realize that they have to limit the number of free accounts they solicit, or their servers will be overloaded, causing very annoying and long page loading times. You may think these very few are doing that for you, but no; they are doing that because they want folks to see and click on the advertisements. Victims will not click on their ads, if they go somewhere else, because it was taking minutes to load a 10K page!

Possibly the worst problem is the lack of user support and the associated fly by night nature of these providers. They feel that because they are providing their service for free, that they can just leave it up to the individual user to agonize over problems by himself without responding to or correcting errors in a timely manner. They are really hurting themselves, as possible paying customers will see how slow their service really is. Many just open up, get some quick advertising bucks and then move to another IP address, leaving the user with a website without a home. I have experienced this problem with Cynetciy ( Bongo's original server ) and it looks like Fiberia ( I never liked this server, because of the cgi redirect scripts that made the links section non-bookmarkable ) is following suit. The jury is still out on Freeservers, though lately it has been a real pain in the ass to update it regularly. Obviously, Theglobe.scum is the absolute worst of them all, with every single one of the above mentioned problems ( it figures, that a disgusting porno server like that would make a mint in the stock market? ).

- Bongo ( The real problem is greed. )