I write for free different tiny programs and I offer them for free to other people. It worked well for about twenty years. After free hosting service which I used died, I tried to find a new one last year. Unfortunately all free hosting services which I found use some kind of restrictions. As a result my site does not work as expected.

A lot of free hosting services do not allow to store on them some types of files such as *.tar.gz or *.tar.bz2. For example my site put at http://open-source.hostfree.pw does not allow to download most of the files because the engine of this hosting service removes those files just after copying them via ftp.

Some other services require constant user’s logins or limit available bandwidth.

So I am asking you: is there any free web hosting service suitable for programmers willing to offer their programs for free?

You mean like GitLab? Or Gitorious or Bitbucket or Codeplane?

For a very low fee, like 3 to 5 EUR per month, you can rent your own VPS and self-host, too.

Just watch out and avoid GitHub. M$ spent a lot of money on the GitHub purchase and has no up front way of recoving that cost, so it is up to something bad there.

While not free, 2MHost is well-worth $48 USD/year. You can put anything on the web, under your own domain name, and without companies trying to monetize your content.
Ed

If you just need a place to hold tarballs? Dropbox.

For a one-time setup fee of £1, you can get otherwise free web hosting with HostMedia.

I can't comment on how good that specific plan is, but I do manage a site on a non-free plan which is ok - reliability isn't brilliant, but mostly good enough for non-critical stuff; likewise support isn't the best, but that's the case with most other shared hosting providers too.

No, I do not mean any of these. Each of them seems to serve for collaborative work on the code. None of them seems to allow to set up the website like this: http://open-source.hostfree.pw.

I prefer free at least for two reasons:

1. I invest my time and my skills in order to write those programs. I am not interested to invest my money as well. Time and skills are enough.

2. I decided to die some day in near or distant future. I would like my site to work after my death without forcing me to pay for it from the grave.

Dropbox is not acceptable for two reasons:

1. You have to sign in into Dropbox in order to see a file.

For the comparison: FTP servers allow you to download the files without setting up an account and login.

2. Just look at this link: cdwrite-3.5.1.tar.gz. It switches you to a Dropbox page including cdwrite-3.5.1.tar.gz file. Then you have to select “Save Page As” in order to download this file. It is annoying for the users.

For the comparison: when you click a file name on a regular website you can download that file instantly. You do not have to sign in or made any intermediate steps.

I prefer web hosting service allowing to store a complete website including tarballs. Alternatively I could put all tarballs on some FTP server and put the appropriate links on my website but this alternative would be annoying for me. Moreover in such case things could go wrong in two places because both web hosting service and FTP hosting service could die some day.

Well, £1 for lifetime service is not too much. On the other hand HostMedia has two drawbacks from my point of view:

1. It allows to run just one website.

2. I would be forced to ask someone to pay this £1 for this website on behalf of me.

Uh, no you don't.

https://help.dropbox.com/files-folde...utside-dropbox

I'm also curious as to why Sourceforge isn't acceptable?

^ came here to say this. Sourceforge is an oldie but a goodie.

New signature material.

You're not the only one - the Internet Archive is helping to solve that for everyone.


Not quite - it is designed for a single site, but unless you abuse the server resources they're not going to care/check.

You've also not mentioned anything other than one single site - how many sites do you need?


Their setup fee is to protect against people abusing the service - it can be paid with card, paypal, or cryptocurrency.
As you've discovered, all hosting has restrictions of one kind or another, you need to choose what you're willing to compromise on.

When you're asking for advice, be upfront on what your requirements/desires are, instead of drip-feeding them only after several people have offered suggestions.

I second SourceForge. It has free webhosting. It allows you a user domain plus a domain for every project. It's geared towards file releases but it does support Discussion, Tickets, Git and more. For small projects it works great.

I guess a filezilla server of your own is out of the question also.
Easy enough to do with a dumpster dive computer.

Counting on off site computer sites to keep your data after you die.

Shoot.

I could not not even get Media cloud service to keep my Puppy isos.
Internet Archive is a private server.
It is nice.

Not sure what happens when they pass on.

Good luck.

Edit: forgot this

https://itsfoss.com/cloud-services-linux/

It seems to me that in order to enable link setting allowing me to share it with anyone I should upgrade to Dropbox Professional. If I would like to pay for some Internet service I would rather pay for a web hosting service than for some file sharing service.

From my point of view SourceForge is not acceptable because link available on my website and pointing some file on SourceForge switches from my site to SourceForge. As a result anyone wishing to download a few files has to switch back and forth between those two sites. It is bad user’s experience.

Well, I knew that mentioning death and grave should cause different off-topic comments but I could not restrain myself from writing those two sentences.

So let us go off-topic for a while. I submit my programs in a few places. Now they are not available because my site died some time ago. I can imagine some determined user looking for my site in WayBackMachine but most users give up at the first difficulty and I cannot blame them for that.

By the way: I just realized that someone mirrored unavailable files from my dead website on SlackBuilds. I am grateful for that but at the same time I feel sorry that someone had to do some work just because my site died. Moreover these mirrored programs available in SlackBuilds are not the current versions.

Writing the post which started this thread I tried to keep it as short as possible. So I mentioned what I am looking for but I passed over many minor details. Especially I did not mention what I am not looking for.

For my programs I need just one site. For the other purposes I need more sites. Here is my site about soroban: http://soroban.hostfree.pw. I put it on the same server as my non working site about programs.

The hostfree.pw domain worked well so far for websites not including archived files, audio files, and movie files. A few days ago I tried to put into hostfree.pw domain some simple site but it went into vhostfull.com instead of hostfree.pw. The sites which I put on hostfree.pw work well. The site put on vhostfull.com does not work at all. So hostfree.pw domain was useful for some time but after it changed to vhostfull.com it became useless. This is frustrating.

I understand that. At present HostMedia is my last option. I am still looking for the first one. As I see probably in vain.

I know. My first hosting server worked for a dozen of years or so. My second one worked for a few years. Both displayed ads if user allowed Java scripts. It was acceptable for me because no one is forced to accept those scripts.

I described my requirements in my very first post. I do not reject other people suggestions because I am malicious. I reject them because they do not meet my requirements.

I believed that there is some free web hosting service without those stupid restrictions. Maybe I was wrong. The world changes – not always in the right direction.

Last year I checked a few dozens of web hosting services. I always started from reading their “Terms of Service” if they were available at all. In a few cases they claimed that they do not accept *.tar.gz or *.tar.bz2 files. It was clear situation so I did not try to use their services. In the other cases I had to create an account and copy files just in order to discover that they do not accept those files. At first I removed those non working websites and my useless accounts. Then I simply abandoned them. If they do not respect my time I do not intend to respect their disk space. Some of those worthless services still mail me about their great new offers.

It sounds promising. I do not understand what all that means but it seems worth to try. Of course SourceForge does not allow to group all projects on one site like this: http://open-source.hostfree.pw. Grouping all own projects together has a point. I wrote all my programs because I was disappointed with the existing ones. Someone who thinks about computing just like me may be interested in my programs and would like to find them collected together in one place.

At present my next to last option is HostMedia and the last one – SourceForge.

I have a few old machines in my drawers but I do not want to heat my room with one more server. (See: greenhouse effect).

I am worrying what happens when I die while I live. After I die I stop worrying at all.

●

I am sorry for my English. I try hard to be communicative but I feel I fail in every other sentence.

Consider also these two options:

The world changes – not always in the right direction.

I am worrying what happens when I die while I live. After I die I stop worrying at all.

I have no idea what you just looked at, but what I showed you does not say that, and it's definitely not the case.

Log into Dropbox from a desktop web browser and click on a file.

There is a giant "Share" button in the top right corner. Click it.

A window pops up with a "Create link" link in its bottom right corner. Click it.

After a few minutes, "Create link" changes to "copy link". Click it.

The download link is in your clipboard. Add it to your web page.