I've been using Homestead for about one year now, and I consider it to be the best at providing free webspace for your website. When you register your account, you get 16 megabytes of space for your website, and an e-mail address (yourusername@homestead.com) Sixteen megabytes should be more than enough needed for the general user. If you decide you need more space, you can create a second site and put the other pages on there. Homestead lets you have as many websites as you wish, but can't have more than 16megabytes on each.

When you work on your site, you will use either Sitebuilder or Express. Express is very basic. It usually has only text, a picture and a couple other things. You can use Express with all computers. Your other option is Sitebuilder. With Sitebuilder, you get more options. When you start working on your site, you'll have to wait a few minutes for it to load. You can add pictures, music files, animations, and many other things. The downside is that not all computers will be able to use Sitebuilder. Also, Sitebuilder takes up a lot of your system resources, so make sure you close out all extra windows.

The Good
Homestead is good for the casual computer user looking to stake their place on the net. You can add HTML code if you want to, but it isn't necessary. The URL name is pretty good, too. A tip, if you name the main page of your site "index", the URL will be shorter. The URL will be something like yourname.homestead.com Index is the default save name when you go to save the first page, so just save it as that for the shorter name. Otherwise, your URL would be yourname.homestead.com/pagename.html. Homestead's customer support has been very good. Whenever I have had a problem, I e-mailed them and they responded in at most 2 or 3 days. They have a small banner ad, but you can choose to have a very small one put on the very bottom of the site where it won't be noticed.

The Bad
When I've used SiteBuilder, I've sometimes found it to be very slow. It would take almost ten minutes to load the page that I wanted to work on. Occasionally it would freeze up. There are also some file types that it won't let you import to add to your site. For pictures, it will only let you import .jpg and .gif. For music files, you can only import .wav, .mid, .aiff, .au.

Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): $0
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: Other ODBC database
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content