Free Web Site Hosting vs.
Paid Web Hosting Options

Now that you are on this page, let me assume that you are shopping for a free web site hosting deal for your site. Of course I know that we all like to get those free deals as much as they we can. As spam shows us though, free and quality are not necessarily one and the same. In fact, it can be harmful if done blindly.

On this article I am going to look at free web site hosting vs. paid website hosting options. Whether or not it's worth it to pay for web hosting entails making some complex decisions that we will look at in a moment.

Free web hosting companies obviously aren't staying in business off of your money, since you are not paying them any. So the question is; how do they make money and why are they providing free web hosting in the first place? More to the point, why should you care to know how stay in business by providing free web hosting to webmasters? Well, as we all know, nothing is really free, so let us see how they manage to stay in business.

Some hosting companies may offer free hosting as a means of attracting new business from new clients.
The idea is that once people see what they have to offer, they will clamor for more and want too sign up with the paid and more quality options. Basically, such companies offer free hosting as a mean of advertising with the goal of converting those free subscribers to become paying clients.
Of course, there are other companies who provide free web hosting who are not in the web hosting business at all? Goggle, Yahoo and others, for instance.

These companies provide a small amount of disk space and a domain name for free. You can do anything you want with these sites, though you may be shut down if you overload servers or go against the stringent terms of service.

In a nutshell, resource limitations are the biggest drawback to free hosting services.

Free hosting services usually offer just a small amount of space. This might be enough to host a small number of pages – but an active site will run out of space fast.

This of course goes hand in hand with server load limitation.

Free web hosts typically place a limit on the bandwidth you are allowed to use. If your site becomes popular and start to attract a lot of visitors, your site may get blocked for the rest of the month or in some cases, asked to leave and shut down

And at the same time, you'll be sharing a server with many other sites, even thousands. Their load affects your site too – this may prompt you to move. Moving an established site can be problematic and is best avoided if possible. This can be an even more nightmare if you were not allowed to register your own domain name and have been using the provided sub domain name provided by the free hosting company. There is another downside to free web site hosting.

There is typically no support offered.

Paid hosting always (at least theoretically) comes with some sort of technical support, backups, network administration – and a hundred other features and benefits as compared to free web site hosting.

A free hosting company will usually restore your site in the event of total disk or server failure. However, if only parts of the disk have failed or you lose a few files due to accidents or virus attacks, you are on your own.

If your site is a small one, this may not be a big problem. You can maintain your own copies somewhere else and do your own recovery. That is, if you have been diligent about backups and that you possess the needed skills to restore your backups.

You'll usually get a few email addresses along with free hosting, intended for administration and other duties. If your needs expand beyond this, you'll have to seek out other options. This email service will usually have minimal oversight and administration as well. While the server may be fairly well insulated from viruses and spam, it is unlikely that they will help you if anything does happen.

Free web site hosting is usually ads supported.

Of course, the biggest limitation free web site hosting has nothing to do with actual or potential technical difficulties. A free hosting service will often require you to place ads on your page that you have no control over and the worst part is that it's the host, not you who will profits from the revenue generated from such ads.

For those starting out, free hosting may be a good way to get a handle on the necessary administration skills, technical skills and problem solving techniques that goes to managing a small website. You can learn to set up a site, how to maintain and update you site and not have to worry so much about being hacked

While free hosting services won't offer most of the features that a paid hosting solution will offer; and that your site will eventually need, they can be a good place to start. If you plan to expand your site, you can begin on a free hosting service but make sure that the free web site hosting service allows you to register and use your own domain name.

Keep in mind all the while that you will eventually have to migrate once your site gets bigger. In the long term, you do get what you pay for – and you might have to pay in order to get what you want.