After several years of maintaining my website at nyrides.freehosting.net, I am suddenly advised that my account has been deleted due to "inactivity," which, the people at freehosting explained to me, means that I haven't logged in frequently enough to demonstrate that I'm still alive.

Visits to the site by cyclists were still booming, though, over the past few months, so I thought I'd take the customer service agent's advice and just re-register and reload my site. However, when I went to the freehosting.net site to do so, I learned that "freehosting" is no longer "free," and that I'd have to pay a monthly fee to keep this non-commercial site up there.

Bottom line? I can't afford the extra expense right now. So if anybody knows of a reliable web host that's still free, please let me know. OR, if you know of another way to make this pretty comprehensive list of bikeways, trails, and road rides in the Long Island/NY area available to the public, I'd like to hear about it.

Thanks!

There are many free hosting services out there. I'm not sure if posting links to them are allowed here, but I can send you a PM with a few choices if you want. I just got into biking and live in NY so I would love to have a place to find new trails. I realize there's a few sites out there like mapmyride dot com but that site can be a PITA to search locally sometimes

Searching google for "free website hosting" yields "About 295,000,000 results." I guess the more important thing is for you to be able to find the time to re-setup. Your site pointed me towards a lot of good, pleasant biking in the last couple of years, so I hope you're able to do it!

I personally use zymic.com for free and reliable non-commerical hosting. As csi56 said, a Google search will show thousands of results. I hope you find the time to re-setup your website, I'm always open to new paths/trails.

Mods: If it's against the rules to post outside links on this forum, please feel free to delete this post.

I just registered for Zymic, took a look at the control panel, and immediately deleted my account. I manage several web sites for other businesses and organizations and the hoops you have to jump through just to do simple things these days are ridiculous. I miss the old days when you created your site on Windows Front Page, hit "publish," then went to bed.

Because the NYRides site is just a hobby, I don't have time to fight with another "free" hosting service that won't provide tech support and doesn't provide clear instructions for how to upload files. Yes, I understand there are thousands of companies that advertise "free" hosting services, and I have had problems with, at least, tens of them. Freehosting, at least, worked most of the time.

Not sure what I'll do now. Until then, if you need some ideas for places to ride in the NY area, I'm not the be-all/end-all final word, but I can probably help!

Tom

Given the resource your site provides, have you though of contacting some of the local bike clubs about hosting on their server(s) ?.

The e-mail link for the person that maintains the generic LI multi-club site - https://www.bicyclelongisland.org/
webmaster@bicyclelongisland.org

Best of luck with this, hate to see all that work go away.

Steve B.

OK, so all of a sudden, i get an e-mail from freehosting telling me the site is back up and that it was taken down because of a complaint that it contained malware. No further info. I wrote back asking if the malware is gone, but they haven't answered.

G-d help us all if this is the way "technical assistance" is going to work from now on.