Good news from my friend Stephan Tual, the main man at Terapad. Terapad is a powerful blog and website hosting service which was launched last September to good reviews but with a bit of a sticking point. It cost money. With free services available from blogger, wordpress and vox, among others, I have to confess that I found it hard to see how they’d be able to gain significant traction compared to those services.

Now Terapad has gone 100% free. And it’s not just a blog platform, either. Stephan explains that there’s also the option of e-commerce, static pages, forums and sophisticated stats:

• The beginner blogger could just activate the blog module and immediately get started with one of our templates. In terms of GUI, we don’t shove features down the user’s throat and all the advanced stuff is neatly tucked out of the way. As the user’s skillset expands, the features are available as needed, of course.
• With features like CMS (complete with WYSIWYG edition, versioning, etc), SMBs can set up a secondary or tertiary site at no cost, they can even use the domain name of their choice and change any of the layout by adapting the CSS to their branding.
• Boutiques, magazines, etc can quickly come up with an online shop at zero cost.
• Anything else – we’re really that flexible.

What’s the catch? Well, of course there is one. But thankfully it’s only a small one. Free Terapad sites will contain Google Adsense units to pay for the bandwidth and hosting. The ads are actually tastefully placed beneath the fold, so don’t really intrude on whatever your core business might be. For a small business selling, say t-shirts, tickets or illustrations, getting a free hosting and e-commerce solution may well be more than enough to justify a switch.

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