subject: Cheap Hosting Plans - Better Than Free Hosting? [print this page] Consider this scenario: you have a small or a medium sized business and want to put your business website on for public viewing. However, you have a tight budget and cannot spend much on webhosting. You hence have two options: free webhosting or budget web hosting.
The free webhosting obviously lets you host your website in the public space for free while the budget web hosting lets you host your website in the public space for a minimum cost. Cheap hosting plans are generally considered a better option because they can, in a nutshell, extend better services than the free webhosting services.
The free webhosting services in fact, can prove counterproductive for your business by turning the visitors away from the website while this might not be the case with the low cost hosting plans.
Let us discuss the relative business cases for both free hosting and budget hosting options.
A free service for webhosting has many problems that will finally go on to impact your business negatively.
First, the service providers in many cases insist on having their name in the domain. Hence, this is a case of losing the identity of your business. Having a website without the name of your business in it is a big setback.
Second, the disk space is not scalable. The disk space may not go up as your business expands and you feel the need to make your website more comprehensive with more content, graphics and animation.
Third, even if the website is hosted with your chosen domain name, you may not be given multiple domain registrations. This could be a reason for a missed business opportunity because if an intending visitor types a different domain inadvertently, your website will be missed.
Fourth, the most irritating and detrimental aspect of the free services are the existence of advertisements all over the place. Pop-ups and banners can come up from any place and that can put off a visitor who might never visit the website again.
Cheap hosting plans, on the other hand, are relatively better off.
First, these plans provide, depending on the package, large amount of disk space. This may not be scalable totally, but will fulfill your disk space requirements to a certain extent at least.
Second, the biggest advantage is having your domain registered. Some cheap hosting plans may even provide for multiple domain registrations.
Third, the other features include e-mail support, CGI, Perl, FrontPage compatibility, technical support and the like. And yes, you would not have advertisements popping up all over the place.
Hiring cheap web hosts is always a better step than having a free one but the option has its limitations too. Hence, it is advisable to migrate to unlimited webhosting plans from affordable hosting as soon as you can.
