The Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Web Hosting
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Web Hosting
Free Hosting: What do you Get for Your Money
The thought of free web hosting can sound appealing at first, you can start up your own website with out having to pay out a single penny but what do you really get with this service and is it really worth taking the risk of not paying for dedicated server hosting?.
Free webhosting can be a great useful tool for the budding web developer, allowing you to test out ideas and scripts for free, and giving you the freedom to express your ideas without being out of pocket. Free hosting can also be great if you just want a small personal website for yourself, friends or family something that does not require a great deal of bandwidth or much server space for files. It also gives you the opportunity to start using FTP and learning about uploading files and getting the information needed to your web space.
As great as this initially sounds on paper, there are quite a few drawbacks in using such hosting which I shall outline for you in today's article.
Free Hosting: The Downsides.
As I touched upon in the last section is it can be a great tool for those of you learning web development without costing you the earth, however, a major drawback is that the majority of free hosting does not come with anything like PHP or MS SQL installed, so you will be extremely limited as to what you can actually work on. The space you are allocated is often very small as well, if you wish to go for advertisement free server hosting you will probably only end up with 100 Meg of space for you files, which is adequate for a small personal site, but if you are looking to develop the site over time, it can pose a definite problem.
Free Hosting: Domain Names
You also do not get a domain name with your hosting. With paid server hosting more often and not you will get to choose and have included in the package, a domain name of your choice, but with free hosting you will only be given a sub domain of the company which is neither appealing nor professional. The name that is allotted to your site is usually a sub name of the website hosting company, so is far from ideal if you are a company or have a product you wish to sell.
Free Hosting: What do you need?
With free hosting you also get a very minimal mount of bandwidth allocated to your site, and you invariably will end up with frequent downtime and server crashes as you will be sharing servers with many other sites, thus putting pressure on the server itself. If you get downtime or you have problems with your server with paid hosting, you have customer and client support that will sort out any errors, reboot the server when needed and generally take care and maintain your server allowing for any problems to be rectified quickly and efficiently. You very rarely get any kind of support with free web hosting which can be frustrating and costly if you are running a business that relies on your constant web presence.
Mail accounts is another hindrance with free web hosting, with paid server management you get multiple emails accounts and forwarding, but with the free option this is highly unlikely to be provided, again hindering any site that needs to keep a certain level of professionalism about it.
Free Web Hosting: Is it really free?
So you have opted for free web hosting, you have designed a nice optimised site, you are advertising your business or product , you upload your site and all of a sudden you have a glaring advert on your page telling your traffic to head to a rival company, how can this be?
Free hosting needs to recoup its costs somehow, so they frequently sell advertising space on their servers. This can look unprofessional, ruin the dynamic of the site or on some rare occasions I have seen in person, advertise competitors businesses on your very own website this is more than downside to your free hosting' as it is no longer free if you are losing money over their advertising policies'.
With any kind of professional website you will want and need to track your stats online. You will need to see who is visiting you, where they came from and what they looked at on your site. Free hosting package offer very poor stats and won't give you a good indication as to what maybe happening on your site, making it hard to optimize as you will be working with very little information.
Free Hosting: The Choice
With so many options available to the internet user out there, it is very easy to find cheap reliable web hosting that does not cost the earth. Free hosting maybe good for your small personal site, but it should never be used for anything commercial. So if you are running your own company or setting out on a new venture then a small search online can bring you the rewards to cheap dedicated server hosting, giving you all the gains at a very small price and have your site up and running in no time at all.
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