Free! That’s a word that everybody loves to hear. And when you get something you need for free, it’s even better. But, you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true. You might find that free hosting brings unexpected costs.
Your website needs to be “hosted” to be online. Without hosting, your site is just a collection of files on a disk. A hosting company places your files on a web server so that they are accessible to the public.
So what’s wrong with using a free hosting company?
- Long URLs – With free hosting your site’s home page can wind up being something like:
http://www.freehost.com/yourname/site/index.html - Advertising Issues – You may be required to have ads and pop-ups for the hosting company or a third-party on your site. Additionally, free hosts can prohibit you from selling advertising space on your own site.
- Lack of Customer Support – Free hosts don’t necessarily have the ability to hire customer service representatives, so problems might not be addressed immediately.
- Increased Downtime – It’s understandable that if the hosting company has no motivation to keep the site running, they won’t necessarily rush to fix it when a problem arises.
- Lack of Security – If you want to set up an online store and process payments across you site, you’d likely want to have a dedicated IP address and security certificate to assure your shoppers that you’re legitimate.
- Space Limitations – Free hosts often limit the size of sites as well as bandwidth (traffic).
These issues can be resolved by using a paid hosting company.
- Shorter URLs. Your home page can be found directly at http://yourname.com
- Your site is free of ads (or you can sell ad space on your own site.)
- Paid hosting companies want to keep their clients’ sites up and keep their clients happy.
- You can set up security on your site to safely take credit card or personal information online.
- There are always limits on size and bandwidth, but the limits are crazy high and rarely reached. Besides, if you have so much traffic that you’re hitting the limits, the site will pay for itself.
Additional benefits of paid hosting include:
- Site Portability – When you own your own domain name, you are able to decide where your site lives. You have control over where it is hosted.
- Confidence in Links – You know what your site’s structure and page addresses are. You don’t have to worry about what might happen to your hosting company in the future. You can submit links to other sites and be confident your pages will stay at their addresses.
- E-mail Capability – You can set up and promote e-mail accounts like you@yourname.com, which is viewed as more professional than you@hotmail.com. Even if you don’t realize it, everyone else knows you’re using a free e-mail account.
