So, you are ready and looking for some tips to decide between free web host or paid web host. I will focus on some facts, so you can decide for yourself.
Let’s have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.
Free web hosting:
1. It’s for free and you don’t need to pay for the domain name.
2. Your URL will be something like username.freehosting.com or freehosting.com/username. As I noticed 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 it is not the point of this article).
3. Your provider will probably include ads to your pages – usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn’t allow it.
4. Free hosts usually allow lower bandwith then paid hosts and a lot of them don’t offer features like PHP and MySQL.
5. A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time. If your free host offers hosting wihtout ads now, don’t be surprised when banner or popup appears on your site in the future.
6. Sometimes free hosts cancel their free service and offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choises – pay them or loose your website.
Paid web hosting:
1. You can host your own domain. i.e yourdomain.com If you decide to change the web hosting provider in the future, you easily transfer the domain to the new provider and don’t loose your traffic.
2. Most paid hosts offer 24/7 support via email or live chat and some of them provide toll-free phone support.
3. You can expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer 99.9% uptime guarantee.
4. Paid hosts usually offer enough disk space and bandwith (usually unlimited space and unlimited bandwith). They offer features like PHP and MySQL.
5. some Paid hosting offers unlimted domain. That means you can host all your sites in one account for one payment.
Before you make the decision if choose free or paid host, you should answer this question: How big ambitions do I have with my website? If you are starting small personal page for your friends consist of a few *.html files then free host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run serious business website, blog, need PHP, database and don’t want ads on the site I recommend to look for quality paid host.


















































