Our favorite free web services

We all love a good freebie and there are literally thousands of free web services out in the web to help all online businesses, Big or Small. The choice in endless and we’ve decided to help cut out on the hours of web surfing to bring you Creation Application’s top 10 free webservices.

1.    Google Analytics

With out doubt the Jedi Master of all web freebies and unsurprisingly brought to us by the Yoda of the web – Google. The vast majority of you that have your own websites will already be employing the Google Analytics tool and benefiting from its amazing insight but if your not, what are you waiting for? Once signed up for the service, Google will send you a tiny bit of code to insert into the header of your website and once published you will able to get vital stats on how many visitors you’re getting, where there coming from and which pages they have viewed. You will even be able to see what browser they have used. The stats are endless and you will be able to formulate marketing strategies that Internet marketing companies would charge you thousands of dollars to produce.

2.    Drop Box

I had originally missed the hype of this free cloud based document back up service and boy was I missing out. Within ten minutes of signing up you are instantly allocated 500MB of space in the cloud to back important documents up. What’s really cool about this is that it integrates directly with your Windows or Mac operating system allowing you to save and access your drop box folder as easily as you would access your own desktop. Add in a fully functional mobile app and the ability to customize folders and share with your friends and colleagues, you can really say goodbye to emailing huge files.

3.    Mail Chimp

So you need to build email-marketing campaigns?

Look no further than mail chimp which is the best free email marketing service online. They have amazing fully customized templates with a wealth of vital stats about the success of your campaign.  With a very healthy free monthly allocation this ones a no brainer and will make your companies email campaigns looks like and feel like you have a marketing budget of thousands of dollars.

4.    Stock- Exchange for free images

There are host of great websites that you can download high quality images for web use or printing but without doubt our favorite is Stock-Exchange. Here you will find fantastic quality images from a wide range of categories. Some of the images will be print quality so say goodbye to paying a king’s ransom for images!

5.    Pingdom

If you have a single standalone website definitely sign up for a pingdom account. Pingdom will proactively monitor your site and immediately contact you if your site is down with a warning email. It also provides you with critical up/downtime information for your site and is a really powerful resource to access the performance of your host provider. You’ll have to pay if you want more than one site monitored but the freebie service will give the vast majority of you what you need.

6.    Flickr

Flickr has been market leader in the photo storage market space a while now but given Picasa’s much improved integration with Google+, we’re not sure how long that will last but it still makes our top 10. With a huge 300MB a month free storage capacity the majority of users are kept more than happy with this photo storage service. Flicker hosts over 5 billion photos and is also a great place for you to source creative common-license photos for credited use on websites.

7.    Gmail & Google Apps for Business

So we all know how awesome gmail but how about routing your own email domain through Google’s servers. So you can essentially have you@yourdomain.com email through Google with all the gmail functionality you’re used to. This will also guarantee you 100% uptime. You will need to sign up for a Google Apps for Business account and change a few MX records but with 10 mins your email will be rerouted.

8.    Google Alerts

Yet another quality freebie from Google (and no we’re not sponsored by them!). This Alert service sends you emails every time Google indexes a webpage with a certain key word on it. Awesome for monitoring a brand, antes or any subject your interested in. You can stipulate the frequency of the email and I recommend you do this otherwise prepare to have your inbox hammered Google style!

9.    You Tube, Vimeo & TubeMogul

We all know what a great free video hosting service YouTube is. And Vimeo, although not as popular, looks better and allows you to host private videos that are viewable with a password. Uploading video can be a time consuming business, however, TubeMogul allows you to upload to a video to YouTube, Vimeo, Veoh, Metacafe, Viddler, and many more for free. And it gives you great viewing statistics from all these channels.

10.    EverNote

Need a digital note pad? Try EverNote. It can be used on every one of your devices for recording thoughts, text, audio, video, images and links.

I feel like I may have short changed services like Word Press, Cloud Fare, YouSendit, Dafont and more. But for a starter for ten check all these freebies out and let us know what you think.

About Keith De Alwis

Keith is Chief Technical Officer of Creation Application and a lover of all things digital. Having spent 18 years working in high-end technology leadership roles he has extensive experience at leading technology teams and taking Products & Services to market.

In no particular order - #AppDeveloper, #TechGeek, #Dogs, #Daddy, #Vegan, #AnimalRights, #CTO, #Entrepreneur, #CreationApplication & long suffering #Arsenal Season Ticket holder.

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