Home » Health & Wellness » Disabilities » Cutting your Online Costs

Cutting your Online Costs

© Michelle Struik

Let me guess, right about now your bank account could support the right environment for a Swiss yodeling contest? Your budget is chopped to the barest of necessities yet you still want to retain your Internet access?

Keeping abreast of free Internet access providers can be a full time job these days. Many of them have had substantial business model problems during the past few months and they have disappeared leaving their customers scrambling for new net access.

If you do decide to take advantage of these services do be prepared to “pay” for your access in another way. Usually they have a specifically designed browser with banner ads. These banner ads are advertisers who actually pay for your net access.

Now if you are going to take advantage of these free ISP's I have a few suggestions you might be interested in:

- Sign up for more than one free ISP. Then if one of them disappears overnight you are not left without access.

- Use a Hotmail or other long-term established free email service for your primary email address. Then you won’t have to chase after lost emails or send out new email address notifications to all your family and friends if your free ISP goes out of business.

- Hang on to those AOL and MSN cd's you receive in snail mail. Then if you suddenly discover all of your free ISP's have died in the middle of the night you still have access to get online to find another one. Usually both AOL and MSN provide free access for the first month (check the fine print), that will give you time to search for a new free ISP.

Now how do you find a free Internet Service Provider? Visit the World of Free Internet Access: Free ISP Directory This directory has listings from around the world. You can also visit their discussion/message base and browse what other people have had to say about their free net access. Sometimes providing you with an early warning system that your free Internet provider might be in financial difficulty and it’s time to find a new one.

Hopefully these tips will help you stay online, maybe you'd even like to share this article with a friend who didn't think they could afford to get online but has an Internet ready computer. Whatever your reasons it's still nice to know that even in a financial crunch the net can still be there. Happy Surfing!

The copyright of the article Cutting your Online Costs in Disabilities is owned by Michelle Struik. Permission to republish Cutting your Online Costs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.