As you can tell from the footer, isle-of-avalon.co.uk is hosted by FreeVirtualServers. Nothing new about free webspace, you might think - haven't Geocities and Tripod (now owned by Yahoo and Lycos respectively) been doing the same thing for years?
Well, not quite. For one thing, the default of FreeVirtualServers is to host your domain name, which if you already have one makes the service completely free; the other sites only give you subdomains or user areas. In itself, that's not a problem. Likewise, FreeVirtualServers offer a comprehensive set of facilities - 100Mb space, 100Mb per month bandwidth allowance, Perl or PHP scripting, email facilities, MySQL or PostgreSQL databases - and more completely than the others, but even that is not the feature that truly sets them apart.
No, what makes FreeVirtualServers actually worth using, unlike the others, is that they don't require you to surrender a portion of your website to nasty Javascript- or Flash-driven advertising that renders your site unreadable to anyone who wants to come along and see it - to the point where if I see a Lycos or Geocities address, my first instinct is to head the other way. FreeVirtualServers don't require any of that - all they ask for is a link that they can detect (presumably they grep your site for it) on your site. (Stick it in the footer, put it on every page, and you're covered.) No other requirements, no other conditions (other than that you don't use it for adult content, and if you're using a preowned domain that you can prove you own it) - that's all.
Which would be great in and of itself, but I'm coming to the best bit - which is their customer service. I've had paid (and actually rather expensive) hosting with much worse customer service than FreeVirtualServers provide! I managed to lose all of my access information for this site the first time, and they promptly supplied it again (within 20 minutes). Of course, I had been a bit daft when setting up the account - my email address was set to the same domain as I was hosting here... and when I mailed them to let them know that I hadn't got my details, they sent them straight back to me. Fast, helpful and courteous - and for no money, that's simply amazing.
And that's why isle-of-avalon.co.uk is hosted here.