• Section: Increase Traffic - Category: Web Hosting
• Written by Bill Pratt

As you talk about free services, most people would think why pay for it when you could just get it for free? And in the field of free hosting, there are a lot of companies from which you could get these services from. However, though this kind of hosting is free, what can you expect to get from one?

Your website would basically be turned to a kind of an advertising machine which works for the free host. So you could expect numerous banners, frames and pop-up windows. These could mess up the look of the website you have, in terms of its accessibility and design. Your visitors may be flooded with multiple pop-ups virtually after each click-through.

You would not be able to make some revenue from advertising on your website, because most free hosts do not permit this. This would not be a very big issue if you are maintaining your personal website, however the cutting-off ad revenues could mean significant loss for your business - in which case you may need to go f

or a paid hosting service.

There would also be a very limited space for the web pages of your website. Free web hosting service providers usually offers just 5 to 15 MB for storage, so the expansion of your website could be severely restricted. If you do opt to expand your website beyond the given amount of disk space, then you might just end up getting a paid hosting plan from the same company or from another web hosting provider. Either way, you might still end up having to pay for your webhosting and you could lose traffic because of the switching.

If you are running an online store, then you would definitely need SSL so that you could secure credit card payments. Most free web hosts do not support SSL or secure web servers. There are a lot of online consumers who fear or fraudulent transactions and are concerned with their personal information so using a free web host for an online store would be very unadvisable.

The uptime of your website would not be very good as well. Downtime that is experienced with free web hosts is common. A lot of web hosts are able to generate their revenue from advertising, so they are not that concerned with the website of a subscriber who does not pay them anyway.

Also, free web hosts oftentimes have just a small group of customer support people, because of their limited budget. You might find yourself just browsing their FAQ pages, looking for support that you might not be able to find anyway.

Ultimately, though paid web hosting could cost you, you might be better off with them, especially if you would be starting an online business. Free web hosting might work for personal websites.

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