Free Web Hosting seems to be in everyone’s budget, but unfortunately, free is not always a good thing. In fact, free can even be dangerous. The question is, when it comes to hosting, can you afford free hosting? In many cases, you really can’t.

Free Web Hosts – How are They Making Money?

When a hosting company is offering free hosting, you must realize that they cannot remain in business, and continue offering free hosting accounts. They must be making money somewhere. The first thing you need to know when considering a free hosting account is where the hosting company is making their money. In most cases, their revenue source will have an impact on you or your visitors.

The first source of revenue may come from ads placed on your webpages. This may affect the overall design – and effectiveness- of your webpages. When your visitors view your pages, they will be subjected to advertisements that you have no control over. This, in turn, could offend them and also lead them away from your site when they click on one of those ads.

Another way that a Web Hosting Company may make money through offering free accounts is to offer the accounts for free in the beginning, and then start charging a fee later on. Ethically, they should let you know that your free account is in essence a trial account, informing you that at some point, you will be charged. Unfortunately, not all do this.

Then there are those who offer free hosting for other reasons, such as Yahoo and Google. Both of these companies offer free hosting and a domain name to everyone. They do this for brand awareness, and to help maintain their communities. Of course, the drawback is that there are Yahoo and Google advertisements on your pages, so that the whole world knows this is who is hosting your site. You also run the risk of being shut down if you are using too much disk space and bandwidth.

Resource limitations

Resource limitations are something that anyone considering a free hosting account should expect and be prepared for. The space and bandwidth is free, and therefore extremely limited. You can usually put several dozen pages on a free Web Hosting account, but you will be extremely limited in terms of audio or video.

Of course more than video and audio suck up bandwidth. Visitors also take up your bandwidth, and if your site becomes popular, and it is hosted on a free server, this is going to be a big problem. If you exceed your bandwidth, the hosting company will block your site for the rest of the month, and you may even be asked to move on.

The performance of your site will be another factor that you should consider. You will be sharing disk space with multiple other sites, and this could slow down the performance of your own site dramatically.

Customer Support

Support is another issue. Most free Web Hosting Companies only offer support to those who pay for the service. If something goes wrong, and you can’t fix it yourself, you are essentially out of luck. The free hosting service may not even offer backups of your site, which could be devastating. If you have a small site, however, you can do your own backups by just retaining copies of everything either on your own system, or on another site.

Email

Not all free hosting services offer email. Those that do will have great limitations on email, and the email that is sent out and received will have an effect on your bandwidth.

However, a free hosting company is beneficial to some. For example, with a free hosting company, you can learn technical skills that you do not currently know. It is also a good place to start out with your website if you have a personal website, as opposed to a business website.

Beyond that, however, it is usually best, from a business standpoint, to go with paid hosting. Not only will you have more space and bandwidth, you will also have more features and greater support, not to mention better site performance.

Credibility

Your credibility will play an important part in your online business success. For this reason, you should never host a business website on a free web server. If you do, this will immediately send up red flags to your customers. They may feel that you aren’t a credible, trustworthy company and leave your site.

If you’re serious about your online business success, free web hosting should be avoided. We highly recommend using HostGator for your web hosting needs. It is a very reasonably priced, professional web hosting company that will provide you with exactly what you will need in a web host.