Labs

Freezone's Essential pack is one of five web-hosting packages in this test that cost £4.69 per month. For this you get 500MB of storage for your website and a monthly traffic allowance of 10GB, both of which are adequate for a home or small-business website. However, if you plan to use a lot of photos, music and videos on your site, space will become cramped. The price includes domain registration for the first year and the facility to establish 20 subdomains. With 200 mailboxes, each of which is accessible through POP, IMAP or a webmail interface and covered by both anti-spam and anti-virus protection, there should be plenty spare

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for other people.

As with most hosts, getting your site online is easy. You can upload it using FTP, the online file manager or directly from your desktop using FrontPage. While novice users will feel the absence of a website builder or automated site generator, a handy software repository containing pre-made applications that you can install directly into your web space will more than compensate for most people. Some of these may occupy your single MySQL slot, however, so you should use this only if you have no custom database requirements for your site.

The Plesk 7-based hosting interface is one of the easiest to get to grips with, but it's not as comprehensive in its options or information display as cPanel-based packages. Although it runs the Linux operating system, the Essential package lacks Perl support, and PHP is limited to version 4.

Although websites hosted with the Essential package are easy to manage, the lack of site-generation tools means this is not the best option for the beginner. However, the combination of a healthy monthly bandwidth allowance, lots of email accounts, useful software library and the single included SQL database makes Freezone's Essential package a solid all-rounder.