I would like to present to you FreeHostia’s Watercircle plan. This is FreeHostia’s cheapest paid hosting plan. As such, it is the first pick of users, who want to upgrade from the free Chocolate hosting plan to one of our paid hosting plans.

In addition to the features of the free hosting plan, the Watercircle plan offers more disk space, extended functionality and removes certain restrictions. Here are some of the key features of the Watercircle hosting plan, which make it better than the free plan:

More resources

The Watercircle plan offers twice as much disk space and monthly traffic compared to the free hosting plan. It comes with 500MB of disk space and 12GB of traffic.

More domains can be hosted

Even with the free hosting plan you can host multiple web sites – it allows hosting for 5 domains. The Watercircle plan doubles the number of domains, which you can host in the same account – 10 top level domains.

Outgoing email service

With the free hosting plan you can create email accounts and receive emails but you cannot use FreeHostia’s email servers to send emails. A workaround would be to use your ISP’s SMTP server for outgoing emails but this means thaт you can only send emails with an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird but not using our webmail. When you upgrade to the Watercircle plan the outgoing mail service is activated, which automatically means that you can use the webmail to send emails, you can use our SMTP servers and you can send script-generated emails (your forum or blog would be able to send activation emails, for example).

No file size limit

On our free hosting plan there is a 500KB file size limit. This means that you are not allowed to upload files, which are bigger than 500KB. There is no such restriction on the Watercircle plan or any of FreeHostia’s paid hosting plans for that matter.

No hotlinking restriction

I have explained in a previous article what hotlinking is (read here). The fact is that with the free hosting plan hotlinking protection is activated by default. There are some cases, in which you would like to be able to hot-link to files in your account from a different location – for example to use images stored in your account on eBay auctions or as a signature or an avatar in forums where you post.

Outgoing connections allowed

There is a restriction of the free hosting plan for making outgoing connection from our servers to other servers on the Net. This is for security reasons, as we have had many abusers using our free hosting plan to make attacks on other web sites. This restriction however makes it impossible for legitimate scripts, which are required to make a connection to a remote server to work as well. Upgrading from the free plan to any of the paid hosting plans, including the Watercircle plan, removes this restriction.

Even faster support

There is a 1-hour response-time guarantee for all customers of FreeHostia’s paid hosting plans. Even if you are using the free hosting plan, you usually get a response within 15 minutes or less, however in certain rare occasions when there are many inquiries, which cannot be physically handled in such short time, our staff answers tickets of paid hosting customers with a higher priority. Paid hosting customers get a guaranteed answer within less than 1 hour.

There are plenty of reasons to upgrade to the Watercircle plan. The Watercircle plan is only $2.95/month and it only takes a minute to upgrade – it’s all done through the web hosting control panel. On the left “Upgrades” table there is a link to the “Change plan” section – you just select the plan, make the payment and the rest of the process is fully automated and instant.