Goodbye Internet freeloading
By James Cooley - November 30 2006
tags: hosting dns
There are a few good free services I use to keep hosting costs down. I have been using them for the last couple of years and I'd recommend them.
- I use zoneedit for DNS - they do mail forwarding so all my mail gets sent to gmail. This is good as you don't need to pay for a server at all to have a reasonable mail service. Zoneedit is free for 5 domains so I use everydns if I need more until the millions roll in. Everydns doesn't forward mail unfortunately but they don't have a limit on free domains.
- directnic.com have $15/year domain registration for .com. They work well and remind me when to renew - this seems to be a problem for registers as Tucows paid $250K on ebay for Kiko's calander.
- I asked NTL Ireland about a business cable service a while back but their entry level business offering was €25K which would buy me a supercomputer with a dedicated server hosting equivalent so I stuck with the 1M home line. I have an old Shuttle XPC under the tv that runs Ubuntu Linux that acts as my main server. I put Linux firmware DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router so it could act as a firewall and port forwarder to the Ubuntu box. It worked well has been running for months. It might be a false economy as it could cost €215 a year to for electricity though.