Affordable Web Hosting Versus Free Web Hosting

Posted by Webmaster Blog 28 September, 2009

Affordable web hosting services are plentiful on the Internet. Free hosting services are even more so, and they appear to be a very good option, after all you can have a web site up and running in a minimal amount of time with zero financial burden. All that is required of you is to create your web site, then wait for your hosting provider to set it up for you, and honestly there is no denying how attractive this type of hosting can be, but first you should consider the pros and cons and decide whether you may be better off choosing an affordable web hosting package instead.

So, firstly we should cover the main advantage of free hosting, and of course that “free” is the most obvious advantage, no ongoing costs to consider is a big draw card for many people new to hosting. When you signed up with your Internet service provider you more than likely were offered free web space as part of the deal. You will also most likely find many web hosting companies offering free space to place your web site on.

Ok, so you decide to go with a free provider, you create your web site, upload the site and they make the web site accessible on the Internet. A business offering free hosting sounds too good to be true, and for many people it is, and at some point in time they move to an affordable web hosting plan instead.

Now free hosting isn’t a bad solution for everyone. If you own a personal web site, this could be the perfect fit for your needs, and some small business owners will use this type of hosting to test our their web site and measure the response it receives, however, before you make your decision to go with free hosting you should consider if an affordable hosting plan might be better suited to your needs, and your web site visitor’s needs.

Ok, so we’ve heard the good about free hosting, but what about the bad. Firstly free hosting has limits, the first problem you will encounter is storage. Typically a free hosting provider will only offer a small quantity of storage on their server for your web site. Due to this you will be limited on the number of pages you can have, or limited in the design, or the ability to serve many images.

You will also receive none of the technical support, or uptime guarantees that you will receive when you pay for an affordable hosting service. Of course you can’t expect any help from a free host since you are getting the hosting for FREE, and if there are any issues like downtime, a free host isn’t required to make any commitment to fix problems in a timely manner. What happens when you find your web site loading slowly due to many other web sites on the server? Nothing happens because a free hosting provider is not obligated to do anything at all.

Affordable web hosting plans also have another huge advantage over free hosting and that is lack of advertisements. Go with a free web hosting provider, and you will have to live with any advertisements on your web site as they see fit, be they banners, pop-ups, pop-under’s, text links, or doorway pages that visitors see before they enter your web site. As you can probably guess, this is how free hosting providers make their money, they are paid to display these advertisements, it’s the only way they can make the income required to pay for the servers and data traffic to the web sites they host.

Ok, so this free hosting isn’t sounding so rosy, well there is another large drawback to free hosting, you will not get to use your own URL. Instead of seeing some nice domain name of your own choosing, you could be stuck with something like www.somefreehost.com/someotherterm/~yourusername. Maybe you don’t mind that the free host supplies you with some irrelevant address, but consider what may happen in the future, if you move to an affordable web hosting provider with your own domain name, you won’t be able to take the longwinded URL with you and any links to your site will be lost once you move to your own domain name on a paid host.

Finally, there is increasing evidence that search engines treat web sites based on free hosting with a lower priority. What does this mean for you, it means your web site may not be indexed in search engines, which will make your web site all but invisible to potential visitors. With affordable web hosting that is paid for, this is not a problem.

The bottom line is this, it does not cost a lot of money to put your web site on a cost-effective and prominent paid hosting provider. All that you need to do is weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of having your web site hosted for free, versus paying a few dollars per month. If you are intending to run a business web site, require more than basic hosting services, or anticipate regular visitors to your web site, I think you will find the cost of an affordable web hosting provider is a small price to pay for the advantages gained.