When it comes to web hosting, you’ve probably heard of the terms free hosting and paid hosting. The difference between the two is like the name suggests – one is free and the other requires payment. The decision of whether to choose paid or free hosting ultimately lies in the nature of your website. Although the thought of saving money is attractive, free hosting, like many other free things has disadvantages that you should contemplate before making up your mind.
Free Hosting
One of the trends with free hosting services — and why they often suffer during the reviewing and ranking process — is the amount of advertisements that appear on each page of your website. Visitors may see an ad on each of your web pages or alternatively, they may be greeted with a pop up banner after each click. Either way, this does prove to be frustrating for the potential customer and portrays a lack of professionalism. If you are running a business website, this means lots of lost profits.
Be Prepared for Poor Customer Reviews
Your site may well experience an increased amount of downtime. When you don’t pay for a service, you can’t exactly make any demands. Free hosting sites rarely go out of their way to be reachable by their subscribers. They are not being paid for the service anyway, so they are not obligated to be dependable. This leads to the other disadvantage of virtually non-existent customer support. These free hosts rarely have live customer support and users often depend on the FAQ page for help.
You should expect limited space with free web hosts. You are allocated a certain amount of disk space, and if you need more space, you will probably have to pay for it, by upgrading to the sites paid packages or perhaps moving to a paying service.
If you are running an ecommerce website that requires customers to pay online via credit card, the chances of getting any sales are slim, since customers tend to be paranoid about fraud, security and privacy. Most free hosting companies don’t support secure server web servers.
If you have an online business that depends on selling ad space to survive, you don’t very well on a free hosting service, since many of them don’t allow you to sell advertising space.
The most obvious set back of free web hosts is the long domain names. They often require you to have a subdomain of the host company’s name. This will affect your traffic, as most potential customers will not be able to remember the website name. It also does not give a professional impression to your site nor will it earn you stellar reviews.
When it comes to web hosting, you’ve probably heard of the terms free hosting and paid hosting. The difference between the two is like the name suggests – one is free and the other requires payment. The decision of whether to choose paid or free hosting ultimately lies in the nature of your website. Although the thought of saving money is attractive, free hosting, like many other free things has disadvantages that you should contemplate before making up your mind.
The Disadvantages of Free Hosting
One of the trends with free hosting services is the amount of advertisements that appear on each page of your website. Visitors may see an ad on each of your web pages or alternatively, they may be greeted with a pop up banner after each click. Either way, this does prove to be frustrating for the potential customer and portrays a lack of professionalism. If you are running a business website, this means lots of lost profits.
Be prepared for an increased amount of downtime. When you don’t pay for a service, you can’t exactly make any demands. Free hosting sites rarely go out of their way to be reachable by their subscribers. They are not being paid for the service anyway, so they are not obligated to be dependable. This leads to the other disadvantage of virtually non-existent customer support. These free hosts rarely have live customer support and users often depend on the FAQ page for help.
You should expect limited space with free web hosts. You are allocated a certain amount of disk space, and if you need more space, you will probably have to pay for it, by upgrading to the sites paid packages or perhaps moving to a paying service.
If you are running an ecommerce website that requires customers to pay online via credit card, the chances of getting any sales are slim, since customers tend to be paranoid about fraud, security and privacy. Most free hosting companies don’t support secure server web servers.
If you have an online business that depends on selling ad space to survive, you don’t very well on a free hosting service, since many of them don’t allow you to sell advertising space.
The most obvious set back of free web hosts is the long domain names. They often require you to have a subdomain of the host company’s name. This will affect your traffic, as most potential customers will not be able to remember the website name. It also does not give a professional impression to your site.
Web Hosting Reviews of Free Hosting Services
Although, there are quite a few disadvantages of free hosting, it is suitable for beginners who want to explore with websites. It can also be a good option for people who simply want to run a personal or family website. If your website doesn’t require a lot of space or you don’t have the finances to pay for hosting, free hosting is available.
Some of the free hosting companies out there are Weebly.com, Wix.com, Webs.com,
Jimdo.com, and WordPress.com. These service providers offer site building tools that are easy to use and even a person who is not technically inclined can use them to create a fully functional website. These websites offer the best free hosting when it comes to customer support, features and overall navigation of the websites.
