Prior to April 2000, ProHosting had been running their free web hosting service for over 3 years without placing ads on the pages it has hosted. This has been one of the reasons many people got accounts at ProHosting. Well, just cuz it's free to us, doesn't mean ProHosting is getting anything for free, including Internet connections, computers and employees. While it was a nice idea, it is not feasible to offer the services that ProHosting is offering without some means to support it financially. To put it another way: somebody has to pay for it.
Okay, so it sucks, but that's the way it is. You may be able to find other places that will offer you free web space without ads, but there aren't many. There are even less that will let you host your own CGIs. In a perfect world, we'd all have free high-speed Internet connections to our homes and could host our own web sites and do whatever we wanted with them. In the real world, it's a trade-off between you paying for the service or letting advertising pay for it.
Basically, the new policy is this: ProHosting will be placing advertising on user pages. I don't know what else to say then that.
Both, and which is used on a given page is up to you.
The default ad display is as an in-line banner add. This means that the banner ad is placed at the top of your page automatically.
Unfortunately, in the case of pages with HTML frames, the system is not smart enough to do one pop-up window for the main frame page and not one for each frame in the page. In this case, or if you just don't want the server to put the ads as in-line banners, then you can force it to use pop-up windows. To do this, you need to add this line to each of your pages before the <BODY> tag:
If the server sees this line, which must be before the <BODY> tag, then it will use a pop-up window instead. In the case of pages with frame, each frame page source has to have the <killbanner> line, like so:
The server inserts the ads in the page "on the fly" when the page is shown served.
ProHosting is looking into other and (maybe) better ways to implement the advertising policy. I have already suggested they try something like the way GeoCities handles ads, which neither interferes with the page's layout nor is an annoying pop-up window. For now, the in-line banners are the default unless use the <killbanner> line in your pages before the <BODY> tag.
As of January 2001, ProHosting now allows you to pay a small yearly fee to have ads removed from your site. For details, see the Banner Removal Options page.
Yes. Since advertising has been implemented on the servers, we have gained the following:
Yes, you can have your own ads on your pages.
Possibly. It seems some JavaScripts are getting messed up. One person pointed out to me that if you link to a JavaScript in a separate file, it seems to help things. To do this, create a file with a ".js" extension with all your JavaScript code (<SCRIPT> tags not needed). And in the HTML file, in the <HEAD> section, add the line: