Following the bankruptcy of my previous web hoster, FranceOnLine, I needed a new hosting provider able to support the features of the fifth major version of the website, on which I was working at the time. My father also needed a paying web hosting service to suit the new technical requirements of his E@sy Cook website.

After having compared a good number of web hosters, we choosed to share a single web hosting plan, which brought us more features for a lesser price than an individual web hosting plan for each site.

Our choice has been Celeonet and its CeleoTurbo plan, with its interesting price/features ratio, to host a maximum of 4 websites (domain names) with a total webspace of 200 MB and a maximum total traffic volume of 20 GB per month. Of course, it has PHP support and the MySQL database count is not limited, just like the maximum FTP accounts number. With this plan, we also have 100 e-mail accounts and 50 subdomains, as well as a weekly backup of our webspace (websites + databases), plus some other options.

Until now, the quality and reliability are here, we did not experience any abusive service interruptions, the server resources seem to be correctly managed, even if a more power-hungry website is being hosted with this plan.

Currently, I can fully recommend this web hosting provider, as we are fully satisfied by its services; however, in case of any major service quality changes, I will not hesitate to report them here!

From January 27th, 2004 to May 2004, the website has been hosted by FranceOnLine. After a long comparison between the different web hosting providers I found, I finally gave a chance to this web hoster I never heard of before.

The price/features ratio looked very interesting, for €15 per year (all charges included), I had a webspace of 100 MB, PHP4 without limitations, a MySQL database without storage limits, a limit of 100.000 hits per day (with unlimited volume data transfers), detailed statistics, and unlimited subdomains, POP & SMTP accounts, redirections, mailing lists... I did not find anything more complete for a similar price.

Everything was okay at the beginning: the service quality was here, with a very efficient technical support through e-mail or forum...

The things went bad (and I then started to regret my choice) when, two or three months after I subscribed, a lot of users started to complain on the FranceOnLine forums: long account opening delays (the homepage guaranteed 10 minutes, may people had to wait several days), as well as more and more frequent slowdowns and crashes... and, strangely, the technical support became suddenly quiet, or even disrespectful according to some user testimonials...

This huge lack of communication led them to bankruptcy, as the website closed several months after, with all hosted websites becoming unavailable... at that time, I was experiencing a big lack of motivation (see news archive) and this sudden interruption of service was more than enough to discourage me from updating my websites: I did not want to reupload an obsolete version of the website on Free, and I did not want to do a quick update on this obsolete version, so my websites remained offline between May 2004 and December 2004, something you'll be able to notice if you browse the news archive...

Such a shame to have ruined a technically competitive website because of a lack of communication...

From November 27, 2001 to January 27, 2004, my websites have been hosted by Free, which is one of the best French internet service providers, if not THE best. I NEVER got ANY problem with them (unlike some other ISPs I tried and will not mention), either with their free internet access, their 50 hours per month dial-up offer, or their DSL offer (I got all three). It also offers, with any plan, an illimited number of e-mail addresses,and, for each one, 100 MB of web disk space extensible up to 1 GB (!), with MySQL and PHP support, counter management, site directories, two addresses in .free.fr and online.fr... without ANY ad!

About the reliability of their free hosting service, no problem for a HTML/DHTML/JavaScript website. However, I had many problems after migrating my website to PHP on December 4th, 2002. I had to face many problems then: several MySQL database server crashes (some lasted for quite long periods, radically freezing my two websites), as well as some site slowdowns from time to time... This information has to be taken carefully though, as many PHP sites hosted by Free do not seem to encounter the same problems...

From December 4th, 2000 (its creation date) to November 27th, 2001, my website has been hosted by Lycos-MultiMania.

My contract with this provider has been prematurely and unilaterally cancelled in November 2001, my account being deleted without notice, because, according to them, I violated their terms of use! And it'd be useless to mention that I never put anything illegal on this website...

And as I was far from being the only one in that situation (I hopefully did not suffer from this, but I know some people who were really harmed by those account suspensions), I can only recommend you, if you have a website hosted on their servers, to have a full backup copy of it on your computer, to avoid important data losses...

If you have the intention to subscribe with this provider, think twice! Be prepared to carefully follow their terms of use...

Note that the service had just been bought by the Lycos company when those massive account suspensions happened...

On December 10th, 2003, I transfered my domain name to BookMyName, who still manages it today.

The choice was easy: among the few French registrars available on the market (look at the list on the ICANN's website), it was the only one to offer, for a price of €8.31 per year (all charges included), a .com, .net or .org domain, as well as a complete Web redirection service, the ability to order and manage several domain names using a single user account...

Even better, you can access and modify most data from the WHOIS base, like the owner's name - the domain name being of course registered at your name, and you're also declared as billing and technical contact.

Of course, you can, at anytime, modify the DNS server addresses on which your domain must go, so you can change your web hosting provider without having to change your domain name provider. It's a service which fully satisfies me as of today, and I can't do nothing else but recommending it to you.

The current domain name of this website, Arachnosoft.com, has been managed from June 20th, 2002 to December 10th, 2003 by 1&1 Sites Web.

This website can register .com, .net or .org domain at very decent prices. For €0.99 per month, all charges included, you have access to a domain name, a POP3 mail account, unlimited e-mail aliases (adress redirections), the redirect of your website with your real URL being hidden...

The service is reliable, you are registered as the owner of your domain name. There are alsom hosting plans at nice prices (the professional plan being at less than €10 per month!). You can also order additional domain names with your plan at a discount price.

If I changed for another domain name provider, it's because the domain name was actually registered from a german registrar, and, having a contract with 1&1, I wasn't allowed to modify the server's DNS addresses so that I could take a paying web hosting for my websites. Therefore I transfered the domain to an independant French registrar.

But apart from that little issue, I did not have any problem with either my previous registrar or 1&1. The domain name transfer has been done without any flaw. So you will certainly agree with me if I say that I kept a good impression of this hosting company.

Since May 1st, 2001, the website is available from the Arachnosoft.fr.st address, offered by Ulimit.com. If it needs to be presented to webmasters and webmistresses who don't already know it, this website offers you to get a domain name quickly and, most of all, for free.

Of course, as it is a free service, you'll not get a "Top Level Domain", an international or nation extension for your site address (.com, .net, .org, .co.uk, .de, .fr, etc..) but more specific extensions (.fr.st, .be.tf...) or even humoristic or targeted (.best.cd, .mp3.ms...), the extensions being managed and maintained by Ulimit.

Having a domain name, even a fancy one, is more than a benefic, when you know that an address like www.mywebsite.fr.st is far much understandable and easy-to-remember than http://www.myhoster.com/~monsite. Ulimit is responsible to redirect automatically any request given to your .fr.st adress, to your "real" address, and it works the same way for e-mail addresses: it gives you an adress like mywebsite@fr.st and redirects any e-mail sent to this address, to your real mailbox.

A very useful, bilingual (English/French) website, but which displays forced ads despite of its great popularity; more and more websites now offer that type of redirection services, with other extensions for your site address.

This .fr.st address still exists today and can still be used to access the website (as well as all the e-mail addresses which are related to it), but now that the website has its own .com domain name, I advise you not to use this address, mainly because of the overuse of ads.