Why is the jpoc web site on tripod?

This breaks down into two sub questions.

First of all, why choose a free site like Tripod, Geocities etc and secondly, why Tripod out of all the free sites available?

Being logical, I shall try to answer the first question first.

I move around a lot and so I rarely stay with one ISP for more than a year or so. I do have an account on cix in the UK which is probably a long term arrangement but, as I am rarely in the UK, it would not be so convenient to have a site hosted there.

There is also another reason for this choice. Although you do have to display ads, free sites have one big advantage over web sites hosted on your ISP. Your ISP gets money from your subscription (unless it is a free one) and, in many cases, from a proportion of the cost of your phone calls.

Your ISP does not receive any revenue from your home site. To them, it is just a cost. What is worse, when people visit your site, they do not channel any revenue to your ISP unless they also happen to be a customer of the same ISP. Lastly, the bandwidth that visitors use to view your site detracts from the service provided by your ISP to their own paying customers. So, all in all, ISPs do not really like customer web sites and, if they have any technical problems, the customer sites will often not be a priority to fix.

Tripod and the other free sites get their revenues from displaying ads on your page to other people on the internet. If their server goes down, they are losing money until it is back up and running again. If they have a bandwidth limitation back onto the net then, by buying more bandwidth, they can serve more pages and thus increase their revenue.

So, I reason that it is a better idea to use a Tripod like service than to use one from an ISP.

Of course, the drawback is the adverts but, Tripod has an option to serve embedded ads and not pop up ones. These are a lot more acceptable to most users.

OK, that is why I use a free hosting service but the next question is, why Tripod?

This is partly by accident and partly because when I chose, I thought that they were a good idea.

Originally, I signed up with Geocities but I was a little confused by all this business about choosing one of their area names and then a number etc etc. Also, they didn't seem to be happy that, at the time, I had a site containing just my contracting CV and they took my site down.

At that time, I only really knew about Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. I had once clicked on a link on some other site which took me to an Angelfire site that carried a lot of adult content. As I didn't intend to set up that sort of a page, I thought that I'd look at Tripod. I now realise that the site on Angelfire was probably in breach of their terms but I decided that I liked Tripod and the fact that I could have my own name in the url and not something like paris/bistro/13576.

So, there you have it, that's why this site is on Tripod and will most likely stay there. Of course, you can also reach the site via jpoc.org which is redirected to the Tripod site. I'd encourage you to bookmark jpoc.org somewhere because if anything does ever happen that makes me move the site, jpoc.org will be redirected to the new location.