Is free web hosting a good option for you? Just about everyone wants to go online and put something up on the Internet these days. Many people just want to express themselves with a blog or diary where they can tell the world about something they are passionate about. The easiest and least expensive way to do this is through free social sites like My Space or Facebook. However, sometime there is good reason to register your own domain and host your own website.
Anything you put on a free social network site really isn’t yours. You are subject to rules and regulations regarding what you can post. There is nothing wrong with having standards, and this usually isn’t a problem for most people, anyway. The biggest reason to have your own site is ownership. If you spend a lot of time building content on a free social site, it can all be wiped out if that site changes the rules or decides there is something about your site they don’t like. It happens.
With the price of paid hosting down to reasonable levels, it makes sense now to consider it. You can register a domain for under $10 a year, and set up paid hosting for about the same amount per month. These paid packages have plenty of disk space and bandwidth allowance for most average webmasters, usually with room for multiple sites if you’re inclined to create them.
Free web hosting, nonetheless, is still popular despite the low cost of superior paid hosting options. For anyone putting up a website as a hobby, or just as a pastime that isn’t a big deal, free hosting might be okay. You would never want to put up a commercial site of any type – free hosting just isn’t right for any business or commercial application.
On the up side, free web hosting is indeed free. No strings attached, usually. Nonetheless, there are drawbacks and reasons that the hosting is free.
Free hosting setups almost always require ads on your site. These are set by the host, and while they won’t necessarily be right in the middle of your page, they will definitely be a distraction to your otherwise nice work.
Other forms of advertising are often used, including popups and other types of advertising that greet your visitors upon entering and leaving your site. These are perhaps more annoying than anything.
You will have pretty serious limits on how much bandwidth you can use, so don’t plan on putting up a lot of videos or other heavy multimedia content.
Your website address will the hosting companies name plus something you create, for example “petejohnson.freewebhostingcompany.com” – not exactly a personalized or glowing expression of you or the impression you want to make on the world.
A lot of fly by night operations tend to get into the business of hosting free web sites. They do this because the idea of getting money from all the ads is appealing. It’s easy enough for someone to get a reseller account with a major hosting provider and set up a hosting service. Problem is, if it doesn’t make money, they can be out of business and gone overnight.
Unless you are just totally broke or don’t care if your site is full of ads, I suggest that you avoid free web hosting completely. Good quality hosting is so affordable now, and you have complete control over your domain and content with it. Go with free hosting if you must, but understand the pros and cons.
Publishing your own web site is a great thing to do!. When choosing a web hosting provider, you have quite a lot of often confusing options. Find out if free web hosting is a plan that will meet your needs.