Segment Publishing is a Sydney, Australia-based company who specialize in standards-compliant web development and FreeBSD-powered web hosting.

From my first impression, I was wary of Segment Publishing as this was the first web host that I had used outside of New Zealand. Soon all my worries were put to rest when I realized that they have thought of every thing. They are more secure that other host I have used.

When I inquired if they had some specific PHP modules, their one worded reply was "Yes". This was such a relief to me.

What I found more impressive latter is that they can sometimes solve my problems within 7 minutes over email... Their support is spot on.

I will see how they go through next year.

See http://www.segpub.com.au

When I first started looking at GoDaddy.com for hosting my site I found that there seemed to be one common opinion.

• Host your domain with them
• Do not host your site with them

I found this to be quite true. Their website seems very cluttered and takes a long time to load. You will find that other companies offer better web-hosting at cheaper prices. If you are wanting your domain details to stay private as well, then Dreamhost.com is cheaper for domains as well.

Overall Feel

I found that GoDaddy was not the cheapest web-host. Although the price looks good, they suck you in with additional deals and every little thing you need is an extra cost.

Their web-hosting is rather slow and I would recommend Dreamhost.com instead.

One of the biggest problems I had was with intermittent 500 Internal Server Errors. As these errors were intermittent, they were very hard to track down. GoDaddy has a large caching proxy server that will cache anything it can. This introduces another layer of complexity and another thing that can go wrong. On my GoDaddy site I was getting intermittent 500 Internal Server Errors that I finally attributed to a lack of support for the Last-Modified header.

Recommendation

I would stay away from them completely. Try Dreamhost.com instead.

The advent of blogging and free blog space has brought about a revolution in web publishing that pushes the boundaries of terms like "webmaster" and "website." In todays brave new world of Internet publishing for the masses, the traditional means of building and hosting a personal website has fallen out of favor for many new webmasters.

If you count yourself among the many bloggers who use a free subdomain blog account, you'll have to think about web hosting sooner or later. Unfortunately, most don't consider the ramifications until it's too late. In the beginning, a free blog account or ad-supported web hosting seems like the obvious choice for a personal site. Unfortunately, this decision - or lack thereof - can cause problems down the road. Issues with free hosting and subdomain hosting range from SEO complications to ownership and control issues. Both free and paid hosting have their own merits and drawbacks, of course, so the ultimate decision is yours to make. But understanding these pros and cons is the first step in making a good decision for your site.

Free Hosting

Pros

It's free

This is obviously the single most important advantage of free web hosting.

It's easy

Anyone can open an account on Blogger or any number of other free services and instantly get a free website requiring no more effort to publish than writing an email.

No experience necessary

Anyone can create a site using one of these free services, with no programming, technical, or even HTML knowledge required.

Cons

Branding

As your blog or website grows, a subdomain hosting account offers little in the way of branding, and may adversely affect your credibility

SEO

If you move away from a subdomain account to your own domain, you will have to start over building links to your new domain.

No control over ad content

With free hosting, you are at the mercy of your hosting company's discretion as to what type of ads will be displayed on your site. Pop-ups and ads for adult sites are not uncommon.

Limited or no accountability for site outages and other problems

When you're getting something for nothing, it's all too easy to become the victim of corporate apathy.

Paid Hosting

Pros

You can host your own domain

With paid hosting, you can brand your site with your own domain name (e.g. MySite.com) and add legitimacy to your content.

Control

With paid hosting, you control every aspect of your site, including design and advertising content.

SEO advantages

With a paid hosting account and domain name, you can build links to your site safely without worrying about whether or not you'll be changing domain names. In addition, a hosting account allows you programmatic and scripting abilities not usually found in free, pre-built websites.

Custom site development

Unlike free blogs, a hosted website can typically run a variety of CGI and scripting applications, and can be built any way you choose.

Accountability and Portability

When you pay for hosting, you hold more leverage over your hosting company in the event of problems. Additionally, by retaining control of your source code and data, you can easily move your site to a new host.

Cons

Expense

Though you can get hosting plans as cheap as $2-$3 per month, it's still a cost that free hosting does not incur.

Some assembly required

Though many paid hosts offer site builders and blog software as part of the package, it still requires more technical work than signing up for a Blogger account.

Maintenance

When you create a site yourself, you become responsible for the upkeep of your own code. In fact, you become responsible for just about everything involved with the site except for the server and connectivity.

So in summary, making the right choice between free or blog site hosting and paid hosting is heavily dependent on both you and your site. Though I've focused heavily on hosting for blog sites, much of the same information applies to free hosting vs. paid hosting for other types of sites as well. The important thing is to take a good hard look at what you want your site to eventually be, how much effort you're willing to put into it, and then make your decision.

Although free blog hosts may be a good way to try out blogging, they come with danger. Make sure that you are not hosting on a free blog host if you are getting serious about blogging.

As blogging becomes more popular than people expected, more and more individuals and businesses are setting up blogs for many reasons. A vast majority of these new blogs are hosted on free blog hosting sites. This can bring more expected problems than it is worth.

For a beginner, free blog hosting can be a brilliant starting point. Without having to spend anything a blog can be setup to try blogging. The problem is that free hosts bring unexpected problems.

The first problem that a many free hosts in the past have faced is that the host is out to make money. If the free blog hosting is not making them money, they will just stop it and leave you out in the cold. This has happened before and it will happen again.

The second problem is uptime. Many of the free blog hosts also run paid services. When they have a problem, they will work on getting the paid service back running before they care about the free hosting. This means that your blog will have more down time and may lose visitors.

Once your blog starts to grow, you might look into making a bit of money with advertisements. If you are lucky enough to be on a host that allows you to place advertisements on your site, you still may run into problems. Free blog hosts always want something and in most cases they want to use the best advertising space at the top of your blog. How is your advertisement going to be seen when people are seeing your hosts advertisement first.

If your blog does become large enough that it prompts your to move hosts, you may find that this too will be a minefield of problems. Moving hosts means changing the URL that your blog is found at. If your free host does not allow this to be redirected, you may have to start your blog all over again, losing your regular visitors.

By all means, use free blog hosts to try out blogging, but if you are serious do not expect that you can get away without paying for a more professional blog host.