----- Original Message -----
From: kahbeh2000
To: BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 2:32 PM
Subject: [BoundaryPoint] bad news

Dear border-friends,

free of charge providers of web-space are a blessing (as it costs
nothing) but can be a pain as

well, as they have pop-up ads and sometimes tend to be off-air.

Tripod used to work fine for me, yet after the merger and renaming
into Lycos the service has

been instable, and now it appears that Lycos has DELETED the
contents of my side! 45 MB of

pictures are GONE. Yes, you read correctly.

I complained bitterly, but you guessed it: no reply. Yet in the
members-discussion forum one can

read (in Dutch) lots of similar scary stories, of innocent people
who lost everything at Lycos.

Lycos does not bother to put any explanation or statement on the
main page of its portal, yet I

learnt from other members who have lost everything this week as
well, that apparently last

Tuesday there was a fatal error in parts of Lycos Holland, Germany
and some other areas. If the

data can be recovered "they don't know" and probably don't care.

Anyone who can suggest a reliable web-space host with fast server
and at least 100 MB space incl.

FTP access, pls, suggestions are more than welcome.

I'm even considering to pay for the service, if it's ads and banner
free.

For the moment thus, it appears that everything is gone, and if this
is the case, I'm afraid the

site won't be back in its old format for a while.

So, I'm sorry, no more European borders at the moment, unless a
miracle happens. Small

consolation, but can still offer my other site about the internal
Belgian language border:

http://linguisticborder.tiscaliweb.nl

depressed regards/verdrietige groeten,
Bernd

Sorry for the loss of your files. I hope they can find a backup. You might want to try looking at <http://thelist.com>. Over on the left site, you will see:

Dedicated Hosts
Business Hosts
Co-location Services
Personal Hosts

and you can look up hosting companies that meet you needs. You might also try asking on alt.www.webmaster . I can't recommend any of these on the list personally, since I only once had a paid site and even then never used it, but most paid hosting companies I have seen are ad free.

If you get a paid site though, you might want to get a www.domain-name.com . I have used <http://www.lowcostdomains.com> which is $24/year, but next time I will likely use <http://godaddy.com> which is $8.95/year. There are a few other low cost ones in the sponsored links at <http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&querytime=Fx2WjB&q=domain+names>.

Here's a hosting company, http://www.affordablehost.com/hosting.shtml> that claims to offer 25 MB space 500 MB/month for $20/year. The lady that operates that site is a regular on alt.www.webmaster and claims they have a 99.50%+ uptime <http://makeashorterlink.com/?H27E31CE>. They apparently have been registering names for exactly two years yesterday <http://makeashorterlink.com/?C19E12CE> and throw in the basic hosting package (25 MB space/ 500 MB/month) if you register with them <http://www.affordablehost.com/order/order2.php>. But I have never used them so I don't know if the claim of 99.50%+ uptime is correct.

HTH

-John