Why Free Web Hosting Doesn’t Work

Free Web Hosting Can Cause You Many Problems

There are quite a few web hosting companies that offer free web hosting, but this is never a good option for your website. 

Essentially, the way free web hosting works is that you go and buy a domain name, and then the free web hosting company provides the rest.  This means disk space and bandwidth along with some support and software for your website.  

It sounds like a good deal, so why wouldn’t you sign up?  There are quite a few reasons:

The first reason is the free advertising that may show up on your site.  

You have to figure that a company that gives away free web hosting has to make money somehow, and they do.  They reserve the right to put advertising on your site in order to make advertising revenue.  The more traffic you get to your site, the more money the company can charge for advertising.  However, don’t be surprised if the company that provides you free web hosting also advertises competing products on your web site. 

Another drawback is the lack of continuity.  

These kind of hosting companies are usually owned and operated by individuals with no operating capital, so as soon as the advertising revenue dries up, the company just disappears.  Along with them go your traffic, rankings and whatever other benefits you have derived from free web hosting.  Of course, this means starting over, so any goals that you have for your web site are still as far away to being accomplished as they were in the first place.

Another trick of free web hosting companies is to sell you additional products.  

So, you may think that if you go with a legitimate company with a well-known name, they’re doing you a favor by hosting your web site for free.  This is definitely not true.  First of all, any scripting, graphics or software that they give you is bare bones, which can really hurt the look and functionality of your site.  Not only does this hold you back as far as web development, you will get constant email reminders to purchase whatever scripting or software this company is famous for, all at a hefty price tag. 

The kind of extra features that they are selling are usually already included in cheap web hosting packages.  In fact, you may wind up spending even more money on free web hosting than if you paid for the service in the first place.  In short, there isn’t any reason to go this route.  Even if you just want a personal or organizational website, it is better just to pay the money for cheap web hosting and save yourself the trouble.  Remember, free web hosting doesn’t come with customer support, so any money that you save in subscription fees will be lost in time spent with your web site and the frustration you will experience by tying to do it all yourself.   

These days, shared hosting is about as cheap as it gets.  

Monthly plans start out at less than five dollars a month, with a 30 day money back guarantee.  Some low cost web hosting companies don’t even require a contract, so there is almost no obligation.  Shop around, and you’ll probably find free months, free software, and unlimited bandwidth and disk space.

Some of the features you can enjoy with affordable web hosting are amazing.  

For example, you usually get an administrative interface like a cPanel, which makes it easier to perform all of your administrative tasks on your website.   CPanel makes the maintenance and monitoring of your site easy with a panel of icons that you can click to access all of your administrative files.  On the cPanel, you will find data that includes information like the main domain name, disk space usage, monthly bandwidth transfer, email accounts, MySQL databases, FTP accounts, mailing lists, and other account information that is available at a glance, anytime you need to check it. 

Another helpful statistic that you can look at quickly is the Latest Visitors icon which can be found under the Logs section.  This file keeps track of visitor statistics using web log analysis software so that you can keep track of traffic on your site.

Low cost web hosting provides so much more for so little that if you are serious about your website at all, you should shop around and find a good business web hosting company.  A free web hosting company simply can’t provide all of the features that a commercial web hosting can.  The ample disk space and band width, a free site builder, free domain name, free software, and stability are worth more than the low prices that these companies currently charge.  

See also: writeyourselfrich.net