Free Community Website Hosting

August 25, 2005 6:53 PM

Looking for a service to set up and host community websites/blogs for free.

Our WorldSmart semester is looking for a place to use as a community website/blog. We want to host writings, photos, other media (files, videos, etc), and possibly a forum.

We don't have a lot of money, it's pretty much unofficial, and we only really need the space for about four months, so it would be a lot better for us to have it hosted on somewhere free. We do have a YahooGroup, but it's private and doesn't offer everything we want.

We're looking for a place with the following features:

* Blog
* Photo Gallery
* Forum or some other form of communication
* Some place to upload files
* Multiple authors (some sort of profile section?)

Limits are OK but there's a lot of us so we may need to accomodate that. My Google-Fu isn't working so well, so many apologies if this has been asked before.

Thanks!

posted by divabat to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You might want to look into Bryght, which is Drupal hosting from some of the core people on the project. It's currently in beta and they won't be charging until they fully launch, and even then you'll get 30 days notice before they start charging you $40.

Or use Blogger for the blog and Flickr or Hello for the photos.
posted by revgeorge at 8:05 PM on August 25, 2005

You might wanna try AirSet and use flicker for the pictures. I've looked for what you are talking about but I can't find any such thing.

Or you could always do yahoo groups. Could thier group format work instead of a blog?
posted by bigmusic at 5:06 AM on August 26, 2005

Response by poster: revgeorge - I'll look into Bryght, thank you. We'd prefer it was somewhere centralized; also, Flickr only shows you the latest 200 photos for free accounts and we could go more than that in a day.

bigmusic - I'll check out AirSet soon, but again we prefer if it's centralized. Not all of us are proficient with computers. We have a private Yahoogroup but it's not really suitable for what we want.

Keep them coming.
posted by divabat at 5:31 AM on August 26, 2005

* Blog - Use Blogger (with its essential tools)
* Photo Gallery - Blogger supports image hosting. Or use Imageshack.
* Forum or some other form of communication - Comments on Blogger (now with captcha)
* Some place to upload files - Rapidshare
* Multiple authors (some sort of profile section?) - blogger supports multiple authors too.

With this combination - you get a full functioning blog on blogger - for free!
posted by webmeta at 8:31 AM on August 26, 2005