I started creating fan sites 4 years ago and as I started to get a little traffic and think about adding to my first site, I started to encounter many issues I hadn't thought about! Disk space limits, bandwidth limits, who owns my domain name, and on and on! What I found was that there are a lot of pitfalls, a lot of hidden costs and it can be tough to find assistance! I have never wanted to be an IT expert and I still don't! I just want to be able to have fun, express myself and celebrate the people, programs, and movies - I'm a fan of!

I know there must be many of you who would enjoy creating a tribute to an actor, a musician, an athlete, a film or a TV show, and I also know that you don't want headaches, or to build a site and find that the server it is on has disappeared overnight. I also know that there are free places to host sites already but I know myself - that when I build a site, I want the freedom to use the photo gallery software I choose and to work with the best tools available and that I feel proud of what I have made and I simply hate having to have pop-ups and ads on every page. So I have started Fans-online to give people the freedom to build and maintain exceptional websites at no charge, utilising the minimum amount of advertising to support this and NO, absolutely NO pop-ups, pop unders or pop anywheres! Not only will there be NO pop-ups but you will be able to have many ad-free pages on your site. How does this work, well let me cut to the chase and explain the two main things you need to know.

1. Video and audio files are limited, you can upload files up to 3Mb in size but anything larger should be embedded on your site via a third party site such as You Tube. This allows you to host video without having to zip it and ask your visitors to mess about with unzipping, they simply can come to your site and click a button to view video. You also have less problems with hotlinking and people will not be able to take your videos and claim them as their own, believe me I am talking from experience here! The additional upside is that by utitlising the many new, excellent services for video hosting available you can save on bandwidth and then less advertising is required to support your site. There is no limit on photos, no limit on text, just media files such as mp3's and video clips are confined to files under 3Mb anything larger must be served via services such as you tube or box.net.

2. The number of ads you will be asked to run will depend on the resources your site will require. For example sites that use up to 100MB in disk space and up to 5GB in bandwidth will only have to serve one advertisement on the main page for news and updates on their site. No other advertising will be required. For details of the number of advertisements required relative to the disk space and bandwidth please see the requirements section. This approach is also 100% flexible, need more space, find that your bandwidth usage is going up - no problems, we will just provide you with ad code to place on additional page(s).