I'd like to put up a web site that my family and friends can access dealing with my travels. I've seen some folks here do that and wanted to ask:<BR>What are the most reliable and cost effective service providers for this? Any help is appreciated.<BR><BR>Mike

I've used both geocities.com and tripod.com. Both of those are heavy on ads including the punishing popup. But they are still "free" -- although geocities has eliminated ftp for those accounts and tripod has cut back the included megs from 50 to 20, but still allows ftp. Of the "free" services I prefer tripod at this time.<BR><BR>I've chosen to pay at geocities -- it's $8.95 a month and includes 25 megs space and NO ADS, plus ftp. I've also registered a couple of domain names which involves and additional cost, but it's kind of kicky to "own" a domain [one is for the fodorite site and one is for my own travels]<BR><BR>I know a couple of people here use homestead.com -- I was already knee deep in geocities and tripod when homestead went "pay" for anything beyond a very basic service.

Mike,<BR><BR>Hope I'm not entirely wasting your time with these suggestions, but . . .<BR><BR>If you don't want to build a website yourself, try the journals at www.igougo.com. After you become a member (free), you can write as many travel journals as you like. Each journal can have as many "chapters" as you like, and you can post four photos for each chapter. Maybe you can create one chapter for each day of your trip, or one chapter for each area, etc.<BR><BR>I also like the "photo album" at www.cartogra.com. It's an hp-sponsored site that lets you upload photos w/some captions. What I like about this is that you can put in a password so that only your family/friends can access it. This is free too.<BR><BR>I prefer the igougo site because it allows for a great mix of text & photos; it's also a handy resource if you want to share your travel tips with others.<BR><BR>Best luck!<BR><BR>s<BR><BR>

I know it is a no no to advertise here, but I host my website (www.appleberryroad.com) through isuperweb.com. There most expensive package is $9.75 a month and includes unlimited webspace, unlimited emails, unlimited subdomains, and much much more. I don't know how they do it but I haven't had any problems with them.<BR><BR>There cheapest plan is just $2.75 a month and includes 50 meg of space - plenty for journals but not alot for pictures.<BR><BR>By the way, I've used about 400 meg of space and have thousands of pictures posted as well as my journals.

Another hat in the ring of website hosting. I use www.webshots.com to post all of my pictures and attach little stories to each picture, in effect giving me a trip journal. The service is free and easy to use. You can check out my photo albumn and how I have set it up at community.webshots.com/user/ehazard1

All of these are good options with different pluses and minues. <BR><BR>The only caveat I would offer for places like webshots is to be sure you have everything backed up on your hard drive. That goes for any site -- but some of these photo sites have gone belly-up without warning. I use ofoto myself -- but more for sharing pictures with friends via invitations than for the wider travel world.

Want to second the caution on some photo sites. I used PhotoLoft; had paid the fees when it no longer was free; and two months later clicked and it was gone. I now use ofoto which is a Kodak site, free, and I hope will be around for quite awhile. I am tired of uploading my photos from my vacations. My last trip photos were all digital so I needed a place to show them to friends and family. (Friends were more willing to look than family....

Hi<BR><BR>If you search around you can create and publish a web site absolutely free.<BR>That includes creation, graphics, sounds, guestbook, Email, Search, weather and hosting. Of course you may get some annoying adds !<BR><BR><BR>I use Netfirms. Seems OK.<BR><BR>Peter<BR> http://tlp.netfirms.com<BR>

The best provider you can get is a Chinese (Hong KOng) one: www.icdsoft.com They give you a whopping 333Mb, wide bandwidth, $5 per annum domain, cgi-bin (in other words full extras) for only $60 a year ($5 a month). They are known to reply to customer support queries in 10mins.

I've been using Homestead. They are now up to $70 a year, but offer more space than I can use, have easy to use tools for building. On the downside, when they had a bulletin board there were many complaints about the service, so I'm not surprised that I can't find the bulletin board any longer. They've just converted to an updated program so I'm hoping they've cleared up the majority of their problems.<BR><BR>Overall, I've been quite happy with Homestead.