When you're strapped for cash what sounds more exciting than Free Web Hosting? But, experience tells us that when a "Freebie" is offered there's usually a catch. In the case of Free Web Hosting the trade-off is that your website pages will display the host's advertising. The free host has to pay for bandwidth and other costs incurred from running their company. Speaking of bandwidth, a lot of these web hosts have so many free web pages running on their servers that the hosting can be very slow at times.

If your site suddenly becomes popular for whatever reason, a free web hosting account will certainly go down and out! People interested in your site will not be able to access till things calm down and get fixed. Watch out for the free host that offers relatively little space. You'll only be able to put text, a few small photos on the site and certainly won't be able to run videos. On a lot of them you won't be able to run "scripts" which in short means you cannot have a blog, forum, or a "contact me" form on the site.

Although you may have the most wonderful products for sale through your website at bargain prices, you can only sell them if people visit your website. When using free web hosting you're limited. In most cases, you can have one account and cannot post links between . Also a lot of free web hosts prefer you put up a personal page and not sell anything from your site.

Most people who want to make money on the internet use a shared or dedicated server hosting account. This way, you can not only place any ads that you want on your site that will generate income for you as you are the website host, but you can also use the extra space to create other sites that are keyword based sales websites. The content containing keywords shows up on the search engines and people are directed to your site with only your ads-not the intrusive ads from a Free Web Host.

If you pay for web hosting your provider must answer your emails or calls and provide good customer service or you'll cancel your account-they lose money. A free web host has no obligation to answer your questions or fix problems in a timely manner. Which means if you have a serious problem you're pretty much on your own! Become buddies with a programmer-you might need 'em.

Is it all bad news? Probably not, but check out this video below that exposes some of the web host review sites that get paid to list web hosts. Some of the web host review sites are nothing more than affiliate links.

You might have a hard time getting search engines to take your site seriously if you have a site that is a sub-domain of the free host. Google and the rest of the search engines will probably not put your site in the first three pages of search results which is where you want to be.

Visit web host forums and ask members who they use as a host and why. Word of mouth means a lot when considering web hosts.

Let's face it, a paid hosting account and a dot com, dot net, dot info, or dot org have a lot more credibility online. Hopefully that's what you're aiming for-believability. Save up and spend a few bucks on a host with a good reputation.