Web Hosting: For Free or Not for Free?

When you are considering web hosting for your site, you will find that there is free hosting and paid hosting.  Free always sounds good but in this case may not be the best decision.  There are many factors in deciding which way to go here.

One thing to remember right up front is that if the hosting company is giving away free hosting for their customers, they have got to be making money some other way or they could not stay in business.  I realize that this may not seem to be your problem, well, it might be.   There is a cost hidden here somewhere, you must find out what that is, before it causes you potential problems.

Some web hosting companies will give away free hosting to attract new business. What can happen in this scenario is, when the free hosting is up, the company will then charge the clients an amount that is targeted at making back the lost revenue in the free time.   Know what the rates are when the “free” runs out so you don’t get a huge surprise.

There are also companies that just offer free services.  They do this by allocating a small amount of space for this purpose. This kind of free service almost always ends in huge loads on the server and if load becomes excessive, they can shut you down.

Now that we have mentioned load, we are getting into a whole lot more negatives to free hosting when we begin talking about limiting resources.  Free hosting, in general, gives very little space, maybe enough space for ten web pages and an active site will run short on room very soon.

You will also, most likely experience serious limitations in your bandwidth use.  If your site begins to take off and you begin to get a fair amount of traffic and besides your visitor’s frustration as everything slows to a crawl, if your visitors are swamping the server, the web host may ask you to move along.

If you become involved in free hosting, you will, most likely, be sharing your equipment with many other clients.  This form of sharing may cause major slow downs at your site. As the load increases, the rate at which your visitors can navigate from page to page begins to get slower and slower.  If the poor performance causes you to leave, you will be inviting a new batch of problems that come with moving from one hosting company to another hosting company.

Free hosting could have yet another dark side; this would come in the lack of support and customer service.  Have you ever heard the old adage “You get what you pay for”?  Well?    No customer support can spell disaster for your site.  You could experience data loss, so if you go for free hosting, you may want to pay for a data recovery service to back you up.

Free services may be great when you are starting out, you can learn the ropes for free, and gain some experience.  When your site starts to gain traffic, it would be time to move to a company that will offer you service and resources to grow your business and site.