Free or paid webhost?

Free or Paid Web Hosting?
By Petr Sejba

Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look for some hosting and make a choice. Your first question will probably be whether to choose a free or paid hosting service. Let's have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.
Free web hosting:

* (+) It's for free. You don't need to pay for a domain name.
* (-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username. As I noted above, the advantage is that you don't need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this problem but these are beyond the scope of this article).
* (-) Your provider will probably include ads on your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site, read their terms and conditions carefully. Some free hosts don't allow it.
* (-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwidth than paid hosts and a lot of them don't offer features like PHP and MySQL.
* (-) A lot of free hosts change their terms and conditions. If your free host offers hosting without ads now, don't be surprised when banner or popups appear on your site in the future.
* (-)Occasionally, free hosts cancel their free service and only offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choices - pay them or loose your website.

Paid web hosting:

* (+) You can host your own domain. If you decide to change your web hosting provider in the future, you can easily transfer the domain to your new provider and don't loose your traffic.
* (+) Most paid hosts offer 24/7 support via email or live chat and some of them provide toll-free phone support.
* (+) You can expect better uptime than on free hosts. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantees.
* (+) Paid hosts usually offer plenty of disk space and bandwidth.
* (+) Features like PHP and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not a programmer, you can download plenty of free PHP scripts from internet.
* (-) Paid hosting costs money )

Before you make the decision to choose free or paid hosting, you should answer this question: What ambitions do I have for my website? If you are starting a small personal page for your friends that consists of a few .html files, then free host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run a serious business website, need PHP, database and don't want ads on your site I recommend you look for a quality paid host.

i was going to make my own article for beginners and i came across this article and i think if you are a beginner these are the points you'll be cominf across, paid or free hosting. just look at the key points when reading through.

Hello,

This article is very interesting, it enable beginners to make a right choice when it comes to web hosting. I don't want to say this is the best option for beginners I will like them to choose which one to pick because I have both here FrontPage web hosting and .EU domain name registration

See my signature also for both paid and free hosting package.

Regards,
Lovely

www.velnet.co.uk give very functional FREE webhosting when you register your domain name with them and the domain registration is quite reasonble priced.

The problem with free hosts is that either they offer pretty little features (take fortunecity or geocities) or go out of business if they are small.

Free web hosting isn't a good idea if you are serious about making some cash, or even getting backlinks to your site, perhaps with the exception of blogger to a degree; would you buy from anonymous@ yahoo.com, url - geocities/anonymous/site.html? I wouldn't.

I was thinking of setting up a free host so every time you make 30 posts on my forum you can get a month's free hosting

30 posts a month. Some people are a bit too busy to that. But i'm sure you'd have reliable paid packages aswel

Yes i will have a hosting site soon but this will ust b a offer for the people posting on my web site

Cool..
Sounds like a good idea but dont become like the other post for host(ing) sites. They seem to last for a couple of months and disappear silently weeping...

Originally Posted by martian2k4

I was thinking of setting up a free host so every time you make 30 posts on my forum you can get a month's free hosting

I can see what you are trying to do but what's the point? Do you drop someone's website because they only made 29 posts one month? Do they get a bill if they don't make 30?

I personally would avoid this type of 'incentive'. Some people might like the idea but I would think it would be abused to the nth degree ~ 30 'me too' posts for a month's free hosting, plus, how do you verify the identity of the person? That would require at least a credit card and who's going to give over a credit card for free hosting?

I think you are setting yourself up for a drop. But who knows? It might work great.