It was less than a year ago that I was walking the floors of the AOL booth at the Consumer Electronics Show.  I felt almost embarrassed to be impressed by some of the cool options and features that AOL had created back then.  They were doing a number of things very well on the innovation front, and I speculated that AOL just might become a real player on the internet again.

maybe

Apparently, cool and cutting edge does not fit the AOL business model.  They announced this month that they are exiting the user generated video market.  They say that they will still offer professionally generated video, in the wake of advances from YouTube that will not only offer TV shows, but full feature movies.

Somehow, I suspect that going back to generic for AOL may not work out too well.  You can only harvest an old business model for so long before there is nothing left to harvest.  I suspect that the only viewers they might be picking up with this new shell of a service will be the rare person that is bird watching with Nikon binoculars and just happens to scan across a computer screen playing an AOL video by mistake.

This week, I came across a small but helpful place for yet more free photo hosting.

This service is provided by Nikon, who has a vested interest in providing a good customer experience for its customers of cameras.

They offer 2 gigabytes of free photo hosting space including the ability to upload and preview RAW files from the web.  If you need more photo hosting space, they charge $3 per month for the next 200 gigabytes.

Its not the best deal in the world, but when you are looking for freebies, every little bit can be useful.  You might not save enough money to buy a Harley or even used Harleys for that matter, but you might just save enough to buy some gloves or a tank of gas. 

Google has recently upgrade or updated blogger so that uploaded pictures are now hosted for free on Picasa Web Albums.

You see the above message sometimes after you have published something through blogger.  The link will take you to your automatically generated Picasa account.  This is something that is very similar to mixing blogger with Google’s version of Flikr.

Now, I do not currently have a lot of images on my Picasa album as I used to keep my images on one of my own servers.  Essentially hot-linking my images from myself as Bloggers former photo album used to be quirky and crashed quite a bit.  I wanted something more reliable than Blogger’s old system that was pretty much only useful for . . . . well  . . .  it wasn’t useful for much of anything.

This looks eminently more useful and after all, it is free and you can’t knock that!

For people posting images to their own self hosted blog through tools like Windows Live Writer, it could even be useful to publish your images to Picasa instead of your own server to help keep your bandwidth usage down and to also benefit from Google’s indexing process which will undoubtedly look at their own picture server service like a teenager stairs at their own acne in the mirror.

I had not heard of DotEasy.com Hosting services before, but came across this review of their Free hosting service.  It would appear that they provide banner free(ergo they do not advertise on your website) hosting service to people and businesses.  The primary drawback of their service per the review is their uptime reliability.

They do offer a paid version as well, which comparatively speaking, looks like last years rates. 

The Free hosting plan is definitely the better buy!  (Go figure  )

Here is what they come with in their service offerings:

Doteasy is providing Linux and Windows web hosting services, has been founded in 1999 and now it’s eigth years in business.

Comes with:
100MB disk storage
1000MB monthly traffic
10 email accounts, with domain registration

Web Hosting Review – Doteasy at Online Business Resources

More information on DotEasy Hosting. 

The free service is supposed to be for business as wells as people.  There is a fee however if you donot register your domain through DotEasy.  If you have your own domain registered already, they charge $35 as a domain transfer fee (I suppose that is for repointing or something, which a typical person can do themselves for free.) 

Domain transfer fee can be waived if you refer 2 people.

So as I see it, if you already own a domain, this is probably not the service for you if you can not find hosting that costs less than $35 per year.  ($50 is about the average so this may be a good deal regardless for simple websites).

If you do not have a domain name yet, then this can be a good buy.

New Domain Registrations cost $18/year, which is about 3 times what I pay to register a domain through iPower ($6.50).  But iPower does not provide free hosting either.

So the important thing here is to look at the total package.  I suspect that this is a great deal for people looking to build websites that are just a landing page or maybe 5-6 page sites covering simple products or services like say plasma lift accessories for TV’s, or affiliate specials or something. 

Its probably also good for people that are looking to create a simple site, say for the kids soccer team, or a teacher creating a simple class page or something, but this probably would not be terribly great for running a dynamic site or a site with lots of images (of course images can be hosted through flikr or something for free.)