Free web hosting - who is providing it and why "free" not always a good idea
To start off with, let`s move away from technical details of free web hosting (we will come to them later in the article) and let`s look at it from a financial point of view. Why would a web hosting company provide their services for free? Why would they spend their valuable resources and not ask for anything in return?
There are several concrete reasons and well-defined benefits for the providers of free web hosting plans.
I read and hear a lot of opinions on this subject. A number of authors have debated that the web hosting providers are earning huge amounts of money from ads placed on their clients` websites. Others have an exact opposite opinion and question "over-the-roof" profits. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. The profit is there, but it is very moderate. Many hosting companies providing free hosting services have closed down during the tough times when the banner ads market was spiralling down. Nevertheless, many of them are still active today and if you are looking to host your website with one of them, keep in mind the following reasons why web hosting is provided for free.
- 1. Free ads - you are likely to have banners and/or pop-up ads on your homepage and potentially on all of your pages.
- 2. Bridge to paid hosting - new web hosting providers often "recruit" their new clients via offering free web hosting services first. The most common model is - "try us first and then pay". Makes sense, right? Unfortunately, after a short period of time, the provider will notify its "free" client base that from tomorrow their services will no longer be free with the assumption that some users would be lazy to go search for another hosting provider (very common trick).
- 3. Polishing up technical knowledge - many new web hosts offer free hosting just to get "guinea pigs" to test out their services/increase technical knowledge etc. Site security, sound and knowledgeable technical support, uptime and the rest of important features are questionable and not guaranteed.
Apart from the main (and only?) advantage of free web hosting - no cost, there are numerous disadvantages that you need to be aware of before you sign up.
First of all, search engines will often ignore your website (will not index the pages) from free web hosts and even if they would, they would rank them very low. This is a huge disadvantage.
Secondly, your visitors might question your credibility! With free web hosting, web link for your website will look like: http://yourwebiste.companyXYZ.com/ where companyXYZ.com is the company providing the free hosting services. This does not give the professional appearance and the seriousness about your business will be questionable.
You are likely to encounter forced advertisement in the form of banners/pop-up ads on all of your pages. There is no guarantee that your website will not be removed (temporarily or permanently) without any warning. You might either lose your website completely without being able to recover any of your data or incur quite a bit of downtime. If you decide to move to another host, keep in mind that the process of transferring your website to another host will not be instantaneous. A website has to be online 24/7 with no downtime (FamiliarHosting gives 99.9% guarantee of uptime) if you want to keep your users/customers.
Also, with free web hosting you will not be able to upload custom error pages. For example, a 404 error is shown when a page is not found. With a paid web hosting you will be able to customise every error page and give instructions/redirect your visitors who erroneously type in the invalid URL. On a free web hosting account the visitor will be shown the web hosting company`s error page and will not see any guidance/instructions as to how to find what they searched for. Your visitor (potential client/user!) might leave.
Customer/technical support, if at all available, might be very poor if non-existent. Whether you are experiencing technical issues with your website or simply require support, being able to direct your questions and get a solution fast from a knowledgeable/technically sound team is always beneficial for you and for your website visitors.
Free web hosting will unlikely conduct daily back-ups for you and make them available to you on request.
I would suggest that for the reasons highlighted above (and many more that have not been discussed in this article) to think carefully about your web host and opt for low cost (budget) web hosting instead such as FamiliarHosting.
