We like to keep an eye on the hosting competition here in Prague, so imagine our concern when we discovered a company offering free hosting on Sitepoint. The ad had been posted in July so we were curious as to how such an offer hadn’t come to our attention before. After all, we only offer free hosting for our Prague design clients, and even then that’s only if we’re doing a special offer promotion.
Of course we clicked the links provided in the ad, but none of them lead to any free hosting plans. Perhaps they too had made this offer as part of some short-lived promotion? Undaunted, we clicked around the poorly designed site and eventually found it via a link to domain registration. There it was, an offer of 30Mb disk storage with 500Mb of monthly bandwidth (misspelt as ‘bandwith’ on the site!).
Presumably the offer was a way of getting you to register a domain name with them, but with a .com listed as 7€ (which is £5.65 at today’s exchange rate - cheaper than our price of £6.99) we thought we’d give it a go. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, the link to order this incredible offer didn’t work (surprise, surprise)!
Oh well, that’s £5.65 saved I guess, and a lesson learned. If an offer looks too good to be true, it probably is.