For your website to appear on the Internet you need your site to be hosted and for that you need a Web Hosting company. Web Hosting is an expanding market and there are thousands of web hosts vying for your business. The services vary vastly between them as does the costs. Among the pricing options is free hosting. Getting something for free always sounds good, but there are many downsides to free hosting.
So you may be wondering how some hosting companies can make a profit if they are offering their services for free. The reason is that they generate advertising revenue. The problem is that this advertising is on your site. The vast majority of free web hosts will put adverts on your website, and you will be unable to decide which adverts appear. This means that the adverts on your site could have nothing to do with your niche, and this will not look good to your visitors. And it’s not always just a small advert discreetly put on your site. The adverts often include pop up advert that can irritate visitors.
It will come as no surprise that the service is nowhere near as good quality as what you will get for paid hosting. There will likely be many limitations to what you can have on your website and the size of it. There will be limited web space and bandwidth. Therefore you will be unable to have a large number of images or videos. It will also mean that the site will be unable to handle a large number of visitors. Free webhosts don’t want to host large sites as this will cost them more. The more bandwidth that is necessary the more it costs. Paid-for hosts will charge you more for larger sites, but as free hosts do not charge you anything they want to keep websites small.
With paid-for hosting you are able to choose your website address (URL). This is often not the case with free hosting though, where your domain name may include the title of the company you are hosted with. This is certainly not good if your website is for business purposes. FTP access is often restricted with free hosting, so you may be unable to make changes to your site when you want to.
If your website is an e-commerce site then free web hosting will not be an option, and they do not offer this type of hosting. For advanced hosting packages such as Dedicated Hosting, Managed Hosting or Colocation you will also have to go elsewhere.
There is one very obvious positive with free hosting – it is free. They are mostly used by beginners with simple requirements. The packaged are restricted, but they can be sufficient for simple, static sites. People often host blogs with free hosts, as they may not require any advanced features. Personal sites that only friends and family are going to visit are another type of website that could be hosted with a free host. If your website is a business site though, then a paid-for host is almost essential for the site to have a successful impact on the business.
Andrew Marshall ©
Colocation
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