Many times the allure of free web hosting is one of the reasons people decide it’s time for them to put something on the Internet and start to build a web empire. However, as you’ll soon read there is really only one advantage to free web hosting over paid and that is that it’s: Free.
Other than that, and with the extremely reasonable rates available in the paid hosting market, the reasons to choose paid over free web hosting are numerous. I would like to preface this by saying that there are a number of amazing free web hosting providers on the Internet and if paid hosting is seriously not in your budget, you will be able to find some free services that can rival some paid.
With that being said, perhaps the most important aspect to choose paid over free web hosting is the fact that there are many free web hosting services that simply go under. When they go out of business, so does your site and all that is with it. More often than not, the reason for this is not unscrupulous activities by the provider’s owners, but because they failed to recognize how quickly their service would grow and simply could not afford to upgrade or keep up with this fast enough.
Although many free web hosting providers have moved to the practice of allowing users to use their own domain name, there are many still that do not. As such, by choosing a free web hosting company your website may wind up with an address like: http://yoursite.theirsite.com or http://www.theirsite.com/yoursite.
Even though URLs such as these are still functional and will work just fine, they leave you extremely limited as far site recognition and growth goes. So, if you do choose a free web hosting provider and it’s in your budget to purchase a domain, it is often advisable to go with a free host that allows you to do so.
One of the largest reasons to choose paid over free web hosting is that on a paid host you’re guaranteed your website will be free of all ads except those that you put up. One of the ways a free web hosting company covers their costs is to put their ads on every page they serve, thus, it’s not really free hosting after all.
Another possible downside to free web hosting is bandwidth and server speed. To help keep costs low, many free web hosting companies will stuff their servers as full as possible with as many websites as they can. This can cause your site to be slow or even go down and become unresponsive. Thus, these issues could render some of your marketing either useless or not as effective as it could be.
Finally, if you’re still looking at choosing a free web hosting service for your website you should make sure they offer the requirements you may want from your site. For example, some free hosts provide PHP and MySQL while some do not. If you think this is a feature you will be wanting to take advantage, verify that the host does indeed provide it.
Whichever route you choose, it’s important to remember that there are good services and reasons for either hosting type. However, more often than not you’ll be much happier in the long run if you do choose paid over free web hosting.
Chris is a web designer and a blogger who loves to write on latest in the world of website development. He understands the importance of having a reliable web hosting provider and he occasionally refers to http://top10webhosting.com/ to find out and compare list of paypal hosting Companies Online.