I must demand that this gets crowned. (f2s.com)

Member Name: theanarchistkid

Product:	f2s.com
Date:	23/02/01 (441 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, good features.

Disadvantages: Sometimes it's a tad unreliable.

F2S or Freedom 2 Surf as it is more properly known is one of the massive band of companies offering free webspace and internet access. F2S has many advantages over its competitors however which make it stand head and shoulders above them. Some of these features may not be particularly accessible for beginners but for the slightly more advanced users, this is a great service.

Signing Up:

To sign up, just head over to www.f2s.com and go to the products/services page. Select the service which you require, fill in some brief forms, receive a confirmation email, reply to that and everything is set up. This part is simple. Having said this, you do need to wait about 24 hours before your account is set up on their servers so if you're looking for instant webspace, this might not be the right company for you.

Setting Up:

Here's the tricky part. F2S don't provide any browser based FTP capability so you have to download an FTP client such as cute FTP (www.tucows.com will have it). For many people this is an advantage because it means that once you have it set up, all you have to do is click on upload from within CuteFTP and everything will be uploaded. For beginners though, there is quite a lot of jargon and technical register used within FTP programs so getting it set up initially could prove to be quite difficult.

Options Within Account:

Within the account area of the F2S website you have a few options to choose from. Some of the most important are Front Page Extensions. This allows the user to turn on or turn off Microsoft Front Page Server Extensions within your website. If your site is designed using Microsoft Front Page the chances are that you may have used some of the custom features built into it such as the guestbook forms and things like that. Because these are slightly non-standard they require special options to be turned on on the server side of things to work, and F2S kindly gives you the abilit
y to do this.
Also within the account area you can set up a database engine for your website although the chances are if you want to do something as complex as this, you will probably want to pay for your web space.

Features that F2S offer:

CGI Scripting - This is a very useful facility that very few free webspace providers will allow you to use. CGI scripts allow a certain amount of interactivity between the website visitors and the website itself. An example of their use would be an Ikonboard forum, which uses a quite complex array of CGI scripting to allow visitors to post messages. A lot of people will have no use for CGI scripting but for me it has proven immensely useful and F2S was the only free web space provider that offered a decent level of freedom whilst implementing this.

20Mb of Web Space - Sure, 20Mb might sound like very little when compared to the size of your hard disk but if you consider that the average website won't be more than 3 or 4 megabytes it's suddenly quite a lot of space. If you have something like a forum on your website or a lot of images/mp3s you could fill it up fairly quickly but for the majority of users this is a very large amount of space.

Free subdomain- Don't get too excited about this because it isn't a proper domain but it is still very useful. If you look at companies such as Geocities you will find that websites hosted on their servers often have massive addresses such as www.geocities.com/Area/User/Page.html. This is going to be tricky for most people to remember so F2S have implemented something called subdomains which allows users to have www.yourname.f2s.com which is obviously much easier to remember for prospective visitors to your site.

Loads of email addresses!- Because you have your own subdomain you can have anythingyoulike@username.f2s.com so effectively you have an unlimited amount of email addresses. Any emails that get sent to this subdomain can
be forwarded to your main email account so there's no need to keep checking in hundreds of accounts every time you want to read your emails.

Website Statistics - These essentially tell you how many visitors have been to your website. It's not a very attractive solution but it does the job nicely and effectively. It's quick and easy which just about sums up a lot of F2S' services.

Problems with F2S -

F2S isn't perfect however, so here are a few things to remember:

Sometimes F2S slows down a lot. This is because of heavy traffic on the site but it means that sometimes your page is inaccesible which means that you can't have any visitors. This can prove to be a real pain if you want your site to have optimum up-time so if this is important for you, you should consider paying for a service which promises 99.9% up-time.

The F2S slowdown isn't restricted only to people visiting your site however, sometimes it is very slow when you are trying to upload files. On my ISDN connection I can normally get about 12K/s upload speeds but when the server is very busy this drops to around 2K/s. This is very slow and is a real pain when you're trying to update your website. Patience is a virtue that most web designers have little of.

More reliability issues - Having spent about 5 hours setting up a great forum on the F2S server, I had it up and running for about 10 minutes. Then, due to a mysterious server glitch, some of the files shrunk to 0Kb in size so the forum stopped working. This resulted in me having to set it all up again. This just goes to show that if you are wanting to host a mission critical website, F2S might not be the ideal solution.

F2S also offers free internet access. This is free in the sense that there is no subscription fee, but you still have to pay phone charges. I haven't used this service because I dial into BT Internet normally but this is what their website
says about it:

"Connect to the Internet via the award winning Freedom To Surf Internet backbone.
Support for:


Modem - up to 56K speeds
64K ISDN
Dual channel 128K ISDN
BT Home Highway 64K and 128K

Calls are charged at Lo-call rates throught the UK.

No adverts, no fuss, just straight through high performance Internet connectivity."

It looks to offer a good service but obviously, I can't comment on speed or reliability.

One VERY important benefit of F2S is that fact that they don't display banner adverts on your site. You can add your own if you like but unlike companies like Geocities, there is no annoying pop-up window or anything like that to deal with. This makes your site appear more professional and makes it more enjoyable for visitors.

Overall, I would highly recommend Freedom 2 Surf because they do offer services that you'd normally have to pay for, for free. It's not perfect, but it is exceptionally good and normally fairly reliable. But as with most things, you get what you pay for in the long term.

Summary: