What about a free web hosting service?

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By Daniel Jackson


What are the problems with free hosting plans?

When choosing a web hosting provider, you'll go through many choices.  One primary choice is whether or not to use a free web hosting provider.

A free web hosting provider will generally fit some people and their content.  Want to host a blog?  A free web provider can handle that with no problem.  Want to have an online store?  A free or even cheap hosting provider is not for you.

Free hosting plans generally come with some limit on bandwidth.  Ever go to a page with: “This user has exceeded their bandwidth for the month. Please try again next month”  These people are using free or cheap web hosting providers and hitting the limits.  If you hit this bandwidth limit, for the rest of that month anyone going to your page will see that message.  It wouldn’t matter if you posted an important update, no one could see it. 

If you've setup a page with basic information and a limited set of visitors, bandwidth is not your issue.  If you want to get past the basic web page and start setting up video clips, there’s the problem.  Bandwidth on even a short video clip would equal thousands of regular text page views.  One video clip to a few people can take up your entire bandwidth for the month.

Another problem encountered with free web hosting is advertising.  A free web host has to make money somewhere.  If that money’s not coming from you, they most likely sell advertising space.  When you provide content to be published, they can link in to certain words to promote products, sell banner ad space on the sides, etc.  They key here is that they are choosing what runs and what doesn’t.  If you’re talking about the PETA movement and the abuse of animals - do you want a banner for a dog food company?  The text of your article could provide keywords for things you’re speaking about, so it would be possible to get conflicting messages.  What if you have something against a certain advertiser?  With a free web host it wouldn’t be possible to refuse space for that advertiser, it’s free and you get what you pay for.

To decide on getting a free web host, take a look at what you want for your content.  To publish an article or get a general blog going, a free provider can be a step in the direction you’d like to go.  For more specific content or for a professional appearance, you’ll want to go to a reputable web hosting plan.

For more articles check out our Weebly pages

You can always check out your free web hosting options at http://www.webhostingoffersdeals.com/

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Justin  says:
2 weeks ago

You make some good points in your article, but I think you are painting with a very broad brush and the negatives you point out are a little out dated. Many free web hosts have updated their methods and bandwidth limits. For example I have a web site hosted by http://www.myownfreeweb.com which is a free web host. I get 10 gigabytes of bandwidth and have never been able to exceed that. So I have never had my visitors turned away. You host your videos at Youtube or any other online site so you don't run down your bandwidth and no matter how many visitors I get I have never had a problem. As far as the adverts, that has never been a problem either. If there is an advertiser that I don't want showing up on my pages I drop my host master an email and I never see that ad again. They can block the ads you don't like. If I really wanted to get rid of the ads, (which they really don't bother me or my visitors) I could just pay $1 per month and they are gone. That is still really cheap considering I get a free domain with my website. I have had many bad free web hosts, but this has been the best so far, and I even have my own Google ads on my website so I make money from it.

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