Excellence of Weebly

Last December, I was into making a squeeze page. I tried my hand at Weebly.com, and was using their free service. I thought I'd start paying when I start spreading the links to that squeeze page. However, that project never completed, and I moved on to other things.

Last week, I thought of redesigning that page and using it as well. To my surprise, Weebly won't let me log-in. I had worked quite hard on making that page, and I thought it would convert well after a few changes. But weebly just wasn't interested. It kept saying "wrong username/password". I thought I might be entering the password wrong so I requested to reset it. When I entered my email, it said "We do not have the email address you specified on record." I contacted their support, and they replied saying they accidentally deactivated my page/account because it was considered spam. However, she also mentioned that she has gone through the page and the deactivation seems to have been a mistake as the page was fine. I responded to her asking when will I be able to use my account again, and I never heard from them again.

There are many newbies - and even veterans - who might be using Weebly for its easy to make websites features, but this incident should be a lesson for all of us. I trusted them and lost a very beautifully designed squeeze page. I was lucky that it was just a page and not an entire website.

If any of you are planning to use Weebly, you better think twice.

I do know some alternatives though, but can't comment on their usage and reliability because I never used them. Other sites that let you make monetizing sites for free are Webs, Moonfruit, Yola, Blinkweb, Lifeyo, Homestead (30 day trial, $4.99/month after that), and Wix (flash sites). Some of these sites don't let you link an existing domain to their pages, so you need to buy domain(s) from them as well.

EDIT: As Alexa pointed out below, I wouldn't recommend buying domain from the host either. It is an open invitation for chaos. I'm not sure which ones among the ones I mentioned above do not permit linking to an existing domain.