After a two-year hiatus, The Portal (PortalWorlds.NET) has returned to the freehost scene. The original partnership included Pacoima Ranch Offices, BK Development and Excelland.COM (a Russian firm). Excelland.COM initially promised a minimum of five years support, but withdrew during the first year, causing the collapse of The Portal. Pacoima Ranch and BK Development learned a great deal about partnerships, financing and advertising funding, though not enough fast enough to keep the initial incarnation viable.

Out of these school-of-hard-knocks lessons, a new partnership and embodiment began emerging in mid 2003. Due to the global glut of server space (a dot bomb consequence) and the continued shrinkage of available webspace with the attendant stabilization of advertising and sponsorship revenues (dot bomb again), it is once again feasible to start freehosts. Carefully marshalling resources, talent, opportunity, and technology, BK Development and Pacoima Ranch formed a new LLC and relaunched The Portal in late December 2003, sort of a Christmas present to the 'Net.

The current marketing campaign ("sumptuous sites of an uncompromising quality") is a statement of fact about the sites, not just advertising hype. Each site comes with its own designer URL:

          (http://yourname.portalworlds.net)

and is loaded with a full CPanel of goodies. PHP, FrontPage, CGI/Perl, custom 404 pages, MySQL, your own mini mail server, dozens of preinstalled scripts, and many more deluxe touches normally only found in expensive hosting packages.

Most pages are expected to have an approved advertisement on them, but the placement and size are left to the Citizen to decide. Sites can earn extra diskspace (they start at 100M) and extra bandwidth (initially 250M) by carefully orchestrating their advertising to "earn" a profit for their pageviews. Both standard banners (468x60) and multiple other standard buttons and sidetowers are available, allowing experienced webmasters and webdevelopers to effortlessly integrate advertising into their designs. In addition, several interstitial, x-layer (DHTML), and onClick popup choices allow pages to be coded without advertising being obvious. The advertisement only shows when leaving or entering a page and can be viewed, then dismissed without rearranging the basic look of the page. The large layer choice is particularly nice, it initially blocks the top of the page, comes into view, then has a "click to close" option that allows the underlying page to be seen with NO advertising on it. People who prefer GUI-look pages will obviously prefer banners and buttons as they fit in very nicely with such designs.

Joining is a little different than many freehosts. After a Citizenship Application is filled out and emailed (via a supereasy form panel), it is reviewed by the Community Webmaster for accuracy. Inaccurate applications are rejected. Incomplete or odd applications are challenged for completeness via email, phone or post. Once the missing or odd information is made available and explained, the application is approved. About 80% of applications are approved on initial review. Most of the "missing data" or "odd" applications are never approved. Applications with false information are outright rejected. The Senior Server Tech creates the subdomain for each account, and a Welcome package is emailed to the new Citizen.