Free Site Hosting Service Review Checked May 13, 2001
http://www.hypermart.net
offers
free hosting for business sites. The free service allows you to setup
a subdomain such as yourname.hypermart.net or use a directory
URL such as http://hypermart.net/yourname. Pick one or the other, but
do not address your site using both!
If you want, you can virtually
host your own domain name there for free. You are still responsible
for paying the $70.00 Internic Registration Fee. This is a fee all
sites with their own name must pay no matter where they are hosted.
I set up my account late at night, and by the next evening, the
subdomain was reachable using my browser. You do have almost immediate
access to your site using http://www.hypernet.net/yourname, but I would
wait until the subdomain becomes active before doing your links. This
way you can use absolute paths with the root or "/" being you! Wait
the day before setting up for real.
The main requirement at Hypermart is that you allow them to display
their sponsor's advertisement on your pages near the top. They refer
to this area as being above the crease, or within 320 pixels of the
top of your page. The banners are about 400X60 and I have not noticed
any ads that I personally would find offensive.
In exchange, you get:
Real FTP access. Not a screwy html/cgi based file manager, but
true to life Unix FTP access.
Unix Apache Server with most things in sensible places.
Nicely written FAQs and discussion groups are available as well
for members.
10MB storage space.
Ability to install your own CGI scripts.
I found working with their server was rather uneventful. This is what
I like. To port any of my scripts over to their servers, just do the
following:
Replace any occurrance of "/usr/lib/sendmail -t" with
"/var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject"
The path to perl 5 (First line in a script) is /usr/local/bin/perl
and perl 4 is /usr/bin/perl
If you use the subdomain name, i.e, yourname.hypernet.net
you can call your cgi-bin scripts as /cgi-bin/script.cgi
The physical path to your files seems to be
/data3/hypermart.net/yourname/ on some servers
Check your path carefully using FTP as the DOCUMENT_ROOT
as shown in diag.cgi is not correct!
All pages are paresed for Server Side Includes (SSI).
DO NOT name your pages with the .shtml extentsion.
Overall Impression:
Hypermart.net is now part of the GO2NET network, but they have
retained their own character. Their servers can be quite busy
at times, but are usually pretty reliable.
