There is no guarantee of up-time. There isn’t any up-time guarantee because the service is free. The service provider may be offline for maintenance without providing you with any warning. This can really hurt you if you are relying on your website for income. You can’t make sales if your site is not online. How will you be paid for this time?
There aren’t enough features. If the service is free, the hosting providers won’t have any reason to pay for upgrades to software or hardware. This is the reason why there are very few features. When you pay for your web hosting service, you will probably be provided with a control panel that is user friendly and easy to use and will enable you to design your site. When you use a free hosting account, you just get basic features for working on your website.
There is no support. A good web hosting company will offer reliable support. You will be able to talk to a real person if you have a problem with your website. If you enter a support ticket, you will usually get a response within a day. You can get help right away from a company that provides live chat. Companies that don’t charge for their services, don’t provide many services. If there is a problem, you will still be able to contact them by e-mail. They are unlikely to answer your e-mail, however.
The shared server environment is unstable. Hundreds of free users tend to abuse the free hosting services. Abusive users just get a free account and then begin uploading multiple sites. Resources may be unfairly allocated to these sites. So, for that reason, you will frequently see free hosting sites go offline. The servers just become overloaded.
There is no warning for the shut down. This could be a real nightmare for you. Naturally, the free web hosting providers will soon realize that offering free hosting is not beneficial to them. This leads them to either totally shut down their servers or start charging for their services. It is normal for them to alert users to a shut down so that files can be removed quickly. If you did not see the email, though, then you might as well have gotten no warning at all! If you want to run a serious online business, you won’t want to use a free web hosting provider. It is better to have a paid hosting account that you share, than a free one. You can get a shared hosting account for only $10 monthly. Anyone can afford that! Even a student! You can get coupons from review sites that will give you good discounts with web hosts. An online coupon is rather like a password. All you have to do is cut and paste the coupons when you are signing up for your new site. Then you will enjoy a significant savings. Use a coupon and save 20 or 30 percent. There isn’t any service commitment with free web hosting, so it is naturally unstable. It really isn’t so expensive to host your website with a top web hosting company.
Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a web designer and web hosting company. If you would rather make a Do-It-Yourself website, InfoServe Media also offers a way to create a site yourself with a very powerful and easy to use site builder. They also provide domain registration, search engine optimization (SEO) and more.