subject: Why Pay for Web Hosting? [print this page] Why Pay for Web Hosting? Why Pay for Web Hosting?
If you have been researching about your options for web hosting, it is very likely that you have come across the idea of there being something like free web hosting.' There are many companies that offer such free' hosting for websites. In fact, unlike most other free' things, which you usually have to jostle in order to get, this free' website hosting seems to be very easily available to an extent that the various companies that offer it seem to be competing to get people to sign up wit them. And of course, besides the free hosting services, we also have the numerous paid web hosting companies.
It is from such a background then, that you could find yourself wondering why anyone would opt to pay for web hosting - while there seems to be so many companies willing to offer it for free. At face value, the idea of paying for something when they can get it for free doesn't seem to make sense. But as you come to realize, there are a number of compelling reasons which make people pay for website hosting services; the existence of free web hosting notwithstanding.
For one, when you decide to use the free hosting services, you normally have to put up with advertisements on your website, put there by the people giving you the free' hosting service. This is a huge compromise to make for some of us. But it is the price you pay for the free' service- because, as you may have learnt earlier, there is nothing like a free lunch in this world. True, you don't pay a dime (directly) to the companies offering the service, but they use your website, and the traffic it attracts, for advertising purposes and end up making lots of more money out of the arrangement than you could have paid them for the service. Sometimes, this doesn't matter if, for instance, yours is just a hobbyist website. But if yours is a business website, you know that the advertisements will end up making it look unprofessional. Worse still, some of the advertisements may be extremely injurious to your strategic objectives. You think of things like this, and suddenly start seeing why it would make sense for you to simply pay for website hosting, the existence of a free similar service notwithstanding.
On another note, the arrangement with most of these free web hosting services will tend to be such you don't own the domain they assign you. In fact, many of them simply assign you what is known as a sub-domain. What this means is that you cannot move the website even when you decide to change hosts. This can be a huge limitation, because it effectively means that you are locked in. You could copy the content of the website to the one you create with a new web host, but you lose the domain name (and it may be quite a while before the search engines come to trust your domain well enough to rank it highly). Furthermore, upon making the move, the search engines are likely to view what resides on your website as duplicate content' (the fact that you deleted the free hosted website' notwithstanding), because the search engines maintain their indexes even when websites are deleted. Your having what appears to the search engines as duplicate content would mean that your new site never ranks. In short, once you get started on a free web hosting service, you are effectively locked in; at least as far as that particular website that you host for free goes.
Further still, you come to realize that free website hosting puts a lot of limitations to you. Most of these free hosting services will tend to assign you too modest resources in terms of hosting space and bandwidth. In most cases, you can't create sub-domains through these systems. There is also a lot of tweaking that you may not be able to do. Take all this into consideration, and you start seeing why it would just be better for you to pay for web hosting; which doesn't cost a lot of money anyway.
