Free Online Applications and Services

Best Free Online Blog Publishing WordPress , "my number one choice based on the features, plethora of free themes and plugins, and the ability to use it as an alternative to create or host a web site with static content."   Blogger is popular and easy to use. You can post text, photos and videos to your blog, personalize it with many templates, add gadgets, get feedback from your readers and more. Best Free Online Domain Name Checker KnowEm , "type in the name you want to use, and the site instantly tells you whether the domain name is available in various countries, and whether it's already in use on any of around 50 different social networking sites." Best Free Online Favicon Favicon.cc , create a new favicon for your own web page, import an image file to edit and save it as a favicon, or search for top rated and latest Favicons. See also Extract a favicon from a web page. Best Free Online FTP Client Net2ftp , a web based FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client to gain access to the FTP server and manage your websites, view and edit codes, add or rename files and directories, upload or download files as well as other advanced FTP functions. Best Free Online Social Networking Facebook , a popular website for you to share your personal profile, posts, photos and videos with friends, add them to your list, send them messages, or join a network group organized by workplace.   Google+ , share your profile, posts, photos and videos or send messages to your circles of friends, start a handout with voice and video chat, search and pin topics of your interest under Sparks, check the things you liked on the web in your +1's, or post a comment in Buzz. A new arrival to rival Facebook.   Twitter , a real-time information network and a micro blogging service allows you to share and discover what's happening now based on brief text messages sent by users via the Twitter website, SMS or external applications. Best Free Online Web Archive Wayback Machine , a fascinating archive of web sites that stretches back more than a decade—just type in the URL of the site you're interested in, and you can browse all the snapshots of the site. See the website of Tech Support Alert (now Gizmo's Freeware) back in December 2000. (Review) Best Free Online Web Hosting Byet provides you with a free hosting service for your web sites without forced advertisements. It features 5.5 GB disk space, 200 GB monthly traffic and a useful control panel to add domains, upload files via an online file manager, create databases, check websites usage, etc. Best Free Online Web Information Alexa , a useful resource to find out information about a website, site owner, traffic statistics, search analytics, clickstream, top sites, hot pages and a lot more. This is our site info according to Alexa. Best Free Online Web Tools CSS Sprite Generator takes a number of source images and combines them into a single "sprite" image, supplies CSS to map to each image within the sprite generated for download. Useful for improving the performance of a web site by reducing the number of HTTP requests.   CSS Portal provides popular CSS tools and online generators in one place, also includes a CSS Sprite Generator that's a fast way to make CSS sprites without the need to zip and upload your source images as all the work is done in your browser.   Smush.it optimizes web images by removing unnecessary bytes from the images without changing their look or visual quality. A "lossless" and convenient tool to minimize image files for your web page. Best Free Online Website Builder Webnode is designed for you to easily build and maintain a website from anywhere online. It's convenient to use with builder tools, drag-and-drop functionality, ready-made gadgets and widgets, and has no intrusive advertisement banner occupying the precious space of your webpage.   Wix allows you to create great-looking flash-based websites easily. Just register, click on a template and start editing. You can change the text, pictures and about everything else, create as many pages and edit them as often as you wish. (Review) Best Free Online Website Performance Measurement WebPagetest , a handy tool to conduct a webpage performance test—just enter a Website URL, click Start Test, and in a short while, you get a summary table with metrics about the page load, first view, repeat view and the content breakdown.   GTmetrix , paste a URL and get the latest performance for a webpage in a summary showing the page speed grade, YSlow grade, page load time, page size and number of http requests. Check out the images that can be optimized too from this service.   Pingdom Tools , test the load time of a web page and find bottlenecks, test DNS servers and settings for a domain name, and test network connectivity to a server. All in one place.   Show Slow helps monitor various website performance metrics by capturing the results of YSlow, Page Speed and dynaTrace rankings over time. You can check performance rankings for Alexa Top 100 websites, compare rankings by graphs or add your URLs to the list for monitoring. Best Free Online Website Template Designer Cool Template "is really very clever indeed. You can change the number of columns, the menus, text, colours, position of content blocks, and just about everything else. When you're done, choose whether you want your finished page downloaded as HTML/CSS files or other templates." Best Free Online Website Uptime Monitor Monitor.Us saves you time and helps keep your site running even more smoothly. Just enter the URL of the sites you want to monitor and log in any time to see a graph of performance including the ping response time and percentage uptime of your site. Some advanced services are not free.  UptimeRobot , monitor up to 50 websites in 5 minutes intervals for each of them and get alerts via email, SMS, RSS, Twitter or push notifications if a website becomes offline. This service finances itself with sponsors and ads to keep it free but with a disclaimer here.