There is out there such a thing as “Free Web Hosting”. Now that sounds like a great thing when you say it but what is the whole story of free hosting?

This subject came to my attention while trying to move a new clients account from one of these free services. Normally this is a simple straight forward process, but with this account something went wrong right off. At first I thought the client had provided a bad password for the old account. That was not the case. Then I thought maybe we were trying to connect to the wrong host. Nope. Turns out the server was down. That was 2 days ago and it’s still unaccessable.

This led me to venture into the forums of the host in question and what I found there has shocked and amazed me. “Those poor clients”  is all I could think of. Here they have spent maybe hours, days, weeks, or in some cases I’m sure, months, building their website, getting things just right and then in great anticipation looking for a web host so they can present their creation to the world.

When they found that free host they probably thought, ” Wonderful. A server to host my site and it’s free!!! Oh Joy to the world!!”. Well now they have their site hosted and probably at first everything seems fine. Then the server crashes. After an untold amount of downtime the host fixes it and the client thinks, “well that wasn’t so bad”.  A few days go by without incident, maybe even weeks, but then it happens again and in the course of a year maybe their site has been unaccessible for a good portion of the time.

The first problem I have with all that is that while reading in that forum it became obvious to me that these poor clients are used to this. as if  it’s all part of the game. IT IS NOT NORMAL PEOPLE! It is not part of the game. Take a few things into consideration.

1. When someone happens to find a link to your site or decides to visit and there is nothing there but site not found or page failed to load, that person probably won’t come back.

2. When a search engine spider tries to spider the site and finds this, the frequency with which the spider visits is surely adjusted to not check back so often. Not to mention what else may be reported back to the search engine which may cause the site to lose page rank or never achieve any rank to begin with because why would a search engine index a website that does not exist?

Free hosting will always be the same animal: free web space and a sub domain, but you must place their advertisements on your website (and receive none of the profits). For many users it doesn’t really matter. However, if you are trying to create a website for business, profit, or professional use you do not want someone else’s ads on your site, period.

Advertising on the internet has become a big business. In fact, billions of dollars are spent each year on internet marketing. If you have a website that’s hosted by a free provider chances are good that you’ve given them their fair share of that billion dollar pie. Having your own hosting leaves you open to choose what you want to do regarding advertising or monetization.

Essentially, your website can make you money much easier than a site that’s hosted for free can. This is primarily because all of the ads that may appear on your website will be because you chose to put them there. If your website becomes popular this could become a big income- why give that to someone else?

Paid hosting has come down in price quite dramatically. You can now find hosting for $3.95 a month at Wizzerdwerks and domain names as low as $12.95 per year. The number of features that that you receive for such a low price are also on the rise.

A few years ago $3.95 a month might have gotten you 100 megabytes of storage and a few e-mail addresses. Today $3.95 gets you 500 megabytes or more of storage, lots of e-mail addresses, multiple FTP accounts, mySQL databases, and so much more.

Many hosting companies, including Wizzerdwerks, will give you a domain name for free when you purchase a hosting plan through them. This is a low-cost way to create a professional and branded website.

The top five issues with free web hosting:

1) Little to No Support

2) Low Bandwidth

3) Advertisements on your Web pages

4) Server Downtime

5) Small Storage Space