Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Hosting
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_ The Price of Free Web Hosting
The best things in life are indeed free and that can apply in the Internet world where freeware programs are helpful along with the many free online services that are available including free website hosting.
With free website hosting, you pretty much have nothing to lose as it is impossible to get charged.
Although free hosting has its advantages, it is important to know the disadvantages as well because being overconfident in a free web hosting solution no matter how good of a reputation it has can possibly lead to the downfall of your site unless you know how to enjoy the benefits of free hosting and workaround its disadvantages.
Advantages of Free Web Hosting
* Easy to Get Started
The only basic requirement in setting up a free hosting account is a valid e-mail address. As long as you have that, you can sign up for a free hosting account in the hosting provider of your choice within minutes. You might be asked to fill up some other personal details, but usually the registration is quick and easy.
Depending on the hosting services, you might be introduced with a site generator that helps you get your first website up and running. These types of free web hosting companies are better providing that they allow you to set up on your own too.
* Feels like Paid Hosting Accounts
This advantage depends entirely on the free web hosting service. Some free web hosting providers give you a cPanel, ability to create databases, support for programming scripts, and enough space and bandwidth for you to make a pretty cool site.
This gives you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the basic functions like file transferring, domain linking and forwarding, FTP, script installation, site maintenance and other webmaster functions.
Although you might be bogged down with some missing features, it does give you the chance to manage your site without being pressured by fees.
* Great for Small Websites
Most web hosting companies give you around 100 MB to 1 GB of free space, but again, this benefit depends on the web hosting company. 100 MB should be good enough for any static website to operate and handle dozens of visitors every day.
With the small website up and running, you can freely take all the time you need to invite people to your website without being pressured with monthly or yearly fees to maintain it. The site performance in most cases doesn’t bog down if you have few daily visitors so those that want to host small websites can enjoy lots of savings.
Disadvantages of Free Web Hosting
* Some Missing Features and Limitations
Every free web hosting account will always have missing features that are present in the paid account. What features are missing depends on the web service, but the most common would be free inboxes, autoresponders, certain programming language support, and certain file type restrictions. Their Terms of
Agreement may restrict certain content to be on the free site, but allowed in paid hosting accounts.
As for the limitations, it can either be bad or exceptional depending on the type of site that you manage. For example, if you plan on hosting a website of your band and plan on offering several free samples of your music along with downloadable videos.
You might end up running out of web space on your registered account or if too many people download your media, you may run out of bandwidth resulting to your site being shut down for a period of time until the next month comes. People that plan on running more dynamic sites, offer more content than usual, or expect more traffic than usual will encounter these problems along the road.
All free hosting accounts do not come with free hosting domain names either and the best that you can be stuck with is a subdomain. While subdomains can be nice, it is recommended to get a paid domain and use it early so your future visitors have only one address to know.
Another major limitation could involve this policy where you must have traffic in order for your website to survive. Some web hosting companies delete websites that do not have much activity. To counter these effects, find a good web hosting service and see their Terms of Agreement for policies.
* Slow Site Performance during Heavy Traffic Periods
Because the web package is free, your website will be placed in a shared server with low specifications that aren’t reliable in handling too much traffic in your site. Once again, it depends on the service, but every free host out there is definitely several times slower than the cheapest paid web hosting plan.
This slowdown is very much noticeable if your site uses lots of images and animations. Only way around this is to optimize your codes and images or switch to a paid hosting.
* Less Secure than Paid Web Hosting Solutions
Your website will most likely be stored in a low-end server along with hundreds of other sites. Since this counts as shared hosting, the security issues apply here that any site that may suffer from an unexpected attack could lead to your site being affected even if it wasn’t targeted.
Because you don’t have full control in some of the options found in paid solutions, you may not be able to handle all the security problems that your site faces. Since attacks could be rare if your site doesn’t get much traffic, but if it does, you may bump into some spam or two if you manage a forum or blog. Switching to a paid hosting is pretty much the only way out.
Free web hosting solutions are a great start, but once the disadvantages start to surface, see if you can work around them, but never tolerate them if things become too tough because paid hosting accounts are so much more powerful than the free accounts.