Toastmasters International, as the name suggests, is an international organisation, present in over 140 countries. Official materials are available in several languages. But like many other organisations, it started its life as an English-only group and the requirements of speakers of other languages weren't on its radar.

Some background

When websites first came on the scene, the same approach tended to apply there. It was assumed that everyone was going to build websites, and send emails, in English.

Because English doesn't use letters with accent marks, it's possible to use a very basic set of characters. But this meant that other languages weren't able to be displayed properly, if at all.

The report of my FTH’s death was an exaggeration! (with apologies to Mark Twain)

The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of recent and ongoing efforts by the FTH team to ensure this service can meet the needs of Toastmasters Clubs.

1. Bug Fixes and incremental improvements
2. Why is my site down?
3. FTH Ambassadors on the forums
4. FTH Documentation
5. Question: What on Earth is a Joomla?
6. FreeToastHost is invigorating this blog!
7. If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is a video worth?
8. Live learning sessions
9. What’s Happening Next?

January 2026 is the 22nd Birthday of Free Toast Host (FTH)! This free service for Toastmasters clubs was founded in 2004 by Dr Bo Bennett, DTM, PHD Social Scientist. The platform has been through a couple rounds of major updates over the years; FTH2 in August 2011 and FTH3 in August 2018.

During October-November 2025, the FreeToastHost club and district websites had frequent episodes of being either inaccessible or extremely slow to load.

This was caused by several different things:

• inefficiencies in the database operations
• large amounts of unwanted traffic from hackers and poorly-behaved search engine and AI bots
• There was also the Amazon AWS outage on 20 October 2025. FTH uses Amazon servers in the US-EAST-1 region, where it all started. Obviously, this one was out of our control but was still very frustrating.

The ones under our control have been addressed and currently the sites are working well.