The free web hosting providers are good enough for things like small personal blogs or for sharing things like pictures of family pets but these are not recommended for business at all due to a lot many reasons.
There are many young would be internet marketers out there who start bad by making a big judgmental mistake about their online business in quest for saving money. They decide to go for a free web hosting service instead of buying a domain and paid host.
Nowadays, you can find lot of webservice companies that offer free web hosting. You’ll find that many serious webmasters actually depend on free web hosting and most of the beginner webmasters go for free web hosting. Both have their different requirements and thus make different choices. There are a lot of resource limits and feature limits in certain free web service providers, We’re going to examine the reasons why and when you should go for free webhosting or choose paid webhosting.
Free web hosting plan won’t be suitable for ?
Let us talk about the purpose for which a free web hosting plan won’t be suitable. Suppose you’re running a website for marketable purposes, like an e-commerce point. It’s essential for you to choose a hosting plan that’s dependable and which doesn’t cause problems by crashing constantly. It’s accessible that for an e-commerce point, every nanosecond of time-out actually translates into lost earnings. You’ll find that indeed some of the free web hosting service provider guarantee you 100% uptime, but indeed if they don’t keep their claim, you can not complain. After all, you can’t complain about the service you’re getting for free. And utmost of the free providers won’t indeed talk of any guarantee. Therefore, it isn’t wise to host your important website on a free web hosting plan.
Free web hosting plan is ideal for ?
Now, let us talk about the purpose for which a free web hosting plan is ideal. However, free website plan is the perfect choice for you, If you’re a beginner and if you’re just testing with the methods of creating a new website. In a free plan, you won’t lose anything and will also get precious experience. However, you’ll find that a free website hosting plan can be the platform to start your career as a webmaster, If you want to put your sites in the world of internet. And as the expression goes, there’s nothing like a free lunch.
Why would anyone offer you free web hosting space?
Well, surely you’ll have to give something in return. The return may be in the form of visiting their advertisers, displaying advertisements on hosted sites, promoting their paid plans, reading emails and sharing in online communities of the free web hosting company. It’s not a question that you might profit a lot from sharing in these online communities. The members of these communities communicate amongst themselves, and as such these forums prove to be a veritably good literacy experience.
And that isn’t all. You’ll find that there are also a lot of beginner webmasters who aren’t bothered with time-out and also don’t wish to pay for hosting. These webmasters make websites for particular purposes.
Still, don’t go for a free webspace provider company! But if you publish websites for your testing and learning propose only, free web hosting might be the perfect choice!
If you’re serious about your website and can not go any downtime. Then you should go for paid hosting.
- Forced Advertisements – Free hosting is not actually free. It actually has a cost attached to it which you pay in the form of forced advertisements plastered to your website pages. And this looks really clumsy, unprofessional and cheap. But it doesn’t stop here. If fact you might be forced to display advertisements of your own competitors because you have absolutely no control over what advertisements get displayed on your website.
- Limited Space and Bandwidth – The space and bandwidth offered by free hosting is strictly limited. Your website gets suspended without any notice if your space of bandwidth usage exceeds the measly limits. This means that when your website is suspended your business and online presence is practically shut down. You can not add any more content. Either you have to delete some content or you need to upgrade to a paid web hosting plan.
- No Domain Name – With most of free services you only able to host subdomains, you do not get any domain name of your own. Internet users have come to expect the real business to have website names like www.mybusinessname.com and any business without its own domain name is considered to be not reliable. When your website does not have its own domain name, you also can not get domain names of your business domain which makes your business all the more questionable and unprofessional. Also there are some free web space providers who allow you to host your own domains.
- No Ownership – When you are running the free site, the content is not in your ownership. Its ownership is with the free web hosting service provider and he or she can delete any of the content at will with or without any reason. There are many horror stories of websites getting shut because of perceived inappropriate content or spamming.
- Limited Support – With free hosting, you get very limited support. You can not call anyone for help if your website is deleted or there is something wrong with your website.
- Lack of Features – It is generally not possible to have many advanced features like optin email lists, shopping carts and ssl certificates etc. As an example, if you are having a free blog on wordpress.com you can not avail the option of excellent plugins which extend the functionality of your website in so many ways.
- Big Risk – And the biggest risk with free hosting is that it may not be free for ever. The free service provider may one day decide to do away with the free packages and your site may get deleted without any notice.
It does not make much sense to opt for free website plan when domain names and paid web hosting has become so inexpensive. With options like WordPress and cheap web hosting, it is absolutely recommended that your purchase your own domain name and opt for paid web hosting. It is so cheap that you can afford paid hosting at the price of one pizza a month.
