Choose Free or Paid Web Host ?
Posted by Spyros Panagiotopoulos in General Website Creation Tips, tags: free web hosting, paid web hosting, web host
I’m sure that all of you have wandered whether you should choose a paid or a free web host. Free, as opposing to paid web hosts have the advantage of no cost at all but many disadvantages too.
For starters, you cannot have the exact domain you wanted to. Free web hosting provides domains like yourName.company.net or something like that, but you always have the company name as the root domain and you are just given a subdomain and this is definately not good. Moreover, free web hosts give you limited and most times low hard disk size and allocated bandwidth for your visitors and may not include mysql databases, emails and such nice add ons.
Another GREAT disadvantage is that in order to make money, free web hosts show up ads in your site and most times LOTS of them, even popups. That is very bad for you, since there’s no real space for your own advertising, you get no money for the ads you show and you have absolutely no control of what kind of ads show up.
If you’re serious about your website, you HAVE TO buy your own web host package. Nowadays, web hosting is pretty cheap and there is no real need to be in trouble with using free web hosts.
Imagine that you decide to create a free web hosting account, upload your site and manage to build quite a lot of traffic to it. However, you would now want to monetize and find that it’s impossible to do since you already show too many ads from the free web host company. Then, you decide that it’s time to move your website over to a paid web host. Now, you have a real problem. The Domain name. Since you need to change to a new domain name, you’ll create a frustration among your website users. Many of them will never get to be to your new domain even if you use redirection from the old one. People out there do not care about your website as much as you do, they see changes and ignore them. You have to rebuild their interest and this is definately not good news for an already established site at an older domain name.
So, whatever you do, ignore free web hosts, unless you’re doing something for fun purposes and have absolutely no need to take it one step further and monetize. If you, contrary to my advice, want to register at a free web host, though, take a look at this big list of free hosts and choose what’s appropriate to you:
http://www.free-webhosts.com/webhosting-01.php
Play with them, create whatever you like and then go back to paid web hosting ! It’ll certainly 100% pay back the little sum you pay now. If you decide that you need paid web hosting, you can take a look at the criteria to choose your web host. Choose the best for you and get ready to show your website to the world !
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