Piece Of Junk On The Internet

I should have made this post long ago. It’s not an advertisement – rather, it’s my way of saying “Thank You” to the company which helped me in getting my first websites online, no matter how crappy they are! This post is all about Trap17 – a web-hosting company that provides free and paid hosting services to its customers. Let me clear up on the paid services first. The rates are the cheapest available and the service is the best available! For as low as $2 per month, you can get 1GB of disk space and 10GB of bandwidth – now who can offer that much at such a low price?! And talking about domains, each domain gets free Google Apps setup and also free ID protection so that your whois record remains private. On popular registrar sites like GoDaddy, one has to shell down a fee for ID protection, unless you’re purchasing in bulk.

Now coming to the best part. Trap17 also provides the same hosting packages for free! The catch is that you have to be an active participant in their forums (the link above leads directly to the forums). This concept is known as post-to-host, which means you have to do some posting to earn your hosting. That my sound quite a cumbersome task to do, but it’s really easy and you can get yourselves a domain ($9.99) with basic hosting ($1.95) in less than a fortnight. (If you don’t spam, that is!) The trap17 forums is pretty large and has a category for everyone. You can talk about anything you like and as long as it makes sense and is useful, you will get credited for it. Here’s how trap17 works:

1) Sign up at the Trap17 forums with a genuine e-mail address.

2) With the same e-mail address, sign up at XistoSupport, which is the place where you buy your hosting. Trap17 is a part of the Xisto network. It’s important that you sign up with the same e-mail address at both sites because….read below!

3) The next step is to simply make some quality posts in the forums. The principle is Quality over Quantity. That means it doesn’t matter how many posts you make, but how good those posts are. There’s a script called the myCENT script which runs in the forum every hour or so. It analyzes the quality of your posts in that period of time and accordingly awards some virtual money to your account, in the form of US Cents. Once you have 100 cents in your account, it gets converted into a dollar and is transferred to your billing account in Xisto. Now do you understand why you have to use the same e-mail address?

You can earn anything between $0.01-$5.00 per post based on how good it is. I generally get $0.30 for a six-lined paragraph and on an average I get $3 per day.

4) Once you have enough dollars in your Xisto account, you can place your order for a domain+hosting. Just select the payment option as “myCENT” in the order page and you’ll get your domain/hosting for free! Now isn’t that simple?

Don’t let the name fool you – it’s anything but a trap! The site’s been online since five years and is one of the few post2host sites left in the business. It has given me five domains already and you’re reading this blog courtesy of trap17. I’ve been there since June ‘09 and as you can see from the picture to the left, I’ve made quite a few posts there!!! I spend 15-30 minutes on an average over there and feel that it’s time well-spent. In the future I hope to become a paid customer of trap17. That way I will be supporting them and continue to get quality hosting.

And if you’re having any doubts about downtime, etc then erase those doubts from your mind. I’ve never seen this domain (or the others for that matter) experience downtime from the day it was registered. That supports the 99.9% uptime claim. The best part is that they don’t put any ads on your site unlike many other free webhosting sites.

So stop running after phony sites which promise lots of features for very little – just come on to trap17 and get some quality hosting for free!