In web hosting services as in all things, you get what you pay for.
Free hosting for your website may seem like a bargain at first until you consider the hidden costs. You have an impossibly cumbersome web address to deal with, search engines will ignore you, and you can’t add message boards, online shopping carts, chatrooms or any of the other interactive features that will keep your prospective audience coming back for more. Why did you put all that energy into designing and uploading a website in the first place? Because you wanted to excite other people about something that excited you! With a free hosting service, however, your cherished site will become little more than a billboard for ads, banners, pop-ups and other spam commissioned by your host.
Inexpensive web hosting solutions start for as little as one to two dollars a month for 20-50 MB of disk space. There are plenty of providers that will offer you gigabytes of space and unlimited bandwidth for under $10 a month. And that’s not all they offer you:
Your Own Domain
With paid web hosting you will have your own domain – much easier for your target audience to remember and an absolute “must” if you want to be ranked well on search engines.
Data Transfer
Ever set your browser to a URL only to discover that the site has been taken down because it exceeded its bandwidth? Bet you never logged on to that site again! Chances are that site is hosted on a free server that isn’t set up to handle robust web traffic. Free web hosts put their clients on a single server that’s overcrowded, slow and frequently offline altogether. Did you put all that work into researching and uploading content so it would only be seen by ten people on alternate Wednesdays? We didn’t think so!
With a paid web provider, your website will be fully capable of handling the audiences it attracts and it will only be offline for occasional maintenance – which you will be informed about well in advance.
Disk Space
Free web hosts allow you only very limited space for your eye-catching graphics, multimedia, interactive features, databases and multiple pages. A paid web host, on the other hand, will provide you with plenty of space for your Internet vision at a price that often works out to just pennies a day.
Better Administrative Options
Paid web hosts routinely provide their customers with services like branded email addresses, autoresponders, email forwarding, FTP access, site statistics, CGI, SSI and PHP. Many of them also provide access to popular WYSIWYG web design programs like FrontPage as well as extras like real audio/video http streaming. You won’t get these services from a free web host.
Unlimited Design Options
Most free web hosts will insist that your website’s appearance conform to one of a very limited number of design templates. Do you really want your website to blend into the crowd? With a paid web host, the only restrictions on your design specs is your imagination.
Customer Service
It’s not easy administering a website. There are times when you definitely need to turn to somebody for help. Free web hosts offer nothing in the way of customer support: If you’re stuck, you’re on your own. But all paid hosts offer customer support, many of them through 24/7 email and/or live chat. Often they give their customers access to a toll-free help phone line.
Reliability
Many free websites are not actually “free:” they exist as bait to get you to pony up for a subscription service that’s generally priced higher than its competitors’ services. The thought is that after dealing with the multiple inconveniences of their free service, eventually you’ll throw up your hands, scream, “I surrender,” and reach for your credit card. (Your site is already on their server, after all; no one wants the hassle of migrating a website if they don’t have to.)
Worst case scenario: one day you log on to administer your site only to be greeted with an announcement that the company has discontinued its free hosting service and your files have been taken offline (and made inaccessible to you) until such time as you decide to show them the money.
Your paid website host is not in the business of blackmailing you or highjacking your files. You have access to your files 24/7.