I am excited to let you know about the new feature we are now offering in my Lorelei Web Forum. We are giving away blogs for free. What does it mean “blogs for free”? In exchange for your participation in the forum, we want to reward the members with blog accounts, which will be hosted on LWblogs.com subdomain.

WordPress blogs is the most popular CMS for websites nowadays, easiest for making money online and unbelievably simple to maintain and use as a publishing platform, as well as secure, reliable and easy to customize for your needs.

• The Free blog account includes:

» Free UNLIMITED Disk Space Your Blog (including UNLIMITED uploads facility)
» Free UNLIMITED Traffic (Bandwidth)
» Latest Version of WordPress 2.3, PHP5, MySQL 5 Reliable Database
» Free Sub-domain Hosting
» Instant Account Set Up
» Private and Commercial Blogs are Welcome
» Easy to use WordPress Control Panel
» Stable Hosting Platform
» Ultra Fast Servers with 99.9% Uptime
» No Hidden Fees or Charges
» Publish Your Own Monetizing Methods, Ads and Banners
» NO FORCED BANNER ADS, FRAMES OR ADVERTS FROM US!

• Total Cost - $0.00 Forever.
  

How free is “free”?

As said above, the blog accounts are given away in exchange for our member’s valued participation in the forum, hence we accept applications from members with minimum of 50 posts and in order to maintain your blog online you need to make around 30 posts in each calendar month once your blog is provided.

• What are the benefits for You?

1. Extra Exposure. LWblogs.com are aggressively promoted on many blogs and sites, and once you set up your account, you will be featured in LWBlogs.com official blog.
2. Infinitely Free. No need to pay for domain and hosting!
3. Free Uploads and Thumbnail generator. You can upload as many images as you want and hotlink them to other servers and forums.
4. Highest Quality Servers — 99,9% Uptime. You are going to be hosted on the save server as toptut.com (this blog), therefore you will enjoy maintaining your fast loading blog that doesn’t go offline like most free hosts do.
5. Pay 0.00$, and Make Money! While the service offered absolutely free, you are allowed to display your own ads of any kind (as long as it’s legal) and make money with ZERO initial investment.
6. NO ADS. No frames, no pop-ups, no Adsense, no ads whatsoever.

• Okay, why is it free then?

It may sound too good to be true for some, but this offer, since we already have a huge hosting plan for our own websites, does not drag us into any additional fees and except domain expenses, promotion and time, we do not investment anything that has to be covered, hence we don’t need to place ads or offer additional services at a cost to cover our own expenses.

Moreover, your participation in Lorelei Web Forum is what we value and seek to encourage, therefore as you can see, it’s your form of paying back for the service.

ImagesHack.us is one of the biggest images host providers. Despite the pop ups and the inconvenience caused by the excess of adverts, the host provides massive bandwidth per domain name (this includes forums as well, so if many members posted large images hosted on imagehack, the files will be down until the next hour when bandwidth throttle will be elapsed again.)

• Supported formats:  .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .tif, .tiff, .swf, - As long as file size does not exceed 1.5 megabytes.

• Advantages:

Many handy tools such as auto clickable thumbnail generator, resizing the image  to different dimentions from 100*75 to 1600*1200. The thumbnails can ge generated with or without the original file’s resolution (you choose), and if you register (for free), you can create your own gallery and see the files you have uploaded, delete unneeded ones, etc. Another advantage is that the files are hosted forever, unless someone reports inappropriate content or copyright infringement. Also, if you find your photo / image been illegaly ripped from your site and hosted on ImagesHack, all you need to do is contact them and they will remove the file, as been a USA based company, they are very accurate with the Copyright laws.

• Disadvantages:

A popup is generated way too often when you view images or enter the site. Understandable as they obviously need to cover the costs of such a big web server, yet we, the selfish free users will moan about it anyway. Another disadvantage is that big files are getting resized upon upload to save bandwidth, so you can’t possible host a huge, high resolution file.  We coul add that hourly BW limit is a burden, but don’t forget that most free file / images host provide a lot less and ImageHack are actually been generous.

If you want to save your bandwidth on the website, you can host the needed images on their free server, then hotlink to the file, but remember if the BW is exceeding you will have an error image with a yellow frog stating the file is temporarily unavailable… so, not recommended for any business or serious website that cares for its reputation.

PhotoBucket is one of the biggest free image storage websites. They require registration (which is free), and if at some point you feel that you need more space, you can always upgrade for a small fee (25$ per year)… But then again, we want a free files host, not a paid one, so we’d have to make do with what we were handed out.

Once you have registered, you can create your own gallery where you can as well generate flash preview galleries of your photos for websites, blogs and forums, make folders, and see, share and display all your uploaded images in your online, customizable gallery.  Max Image Size upload !MB, 17″ Screen (1024 x 768 resolution image).

The free account provides you with 1GB space and 10GB monthly bandwidth, which is pretty much a lot. Moreover, you can upload videos of up to 5 minutes lengt. The upload can be made from both your local machine or web URL (this is a new feature) and upload up to 20 images at a time. All files you hos on PhotoBucket automatically generated in thumbnails for a preview and offer URL ready to use in HTML and BB (forums) code, as well as direct URL for hot linking. I personally use PhotoBucket and find it to be a very fast, easy and convenient way to store images online which all can be easily accessed through your well organized gallery.