Getting a Free Web Hosting Service? Read This.

There is no one in the world who doesn’t like getting things for free. But, the presence of spam tells that free can sometimes be harmful. Before deciding if you should pay a company for hosting, there are number of things you should consider.

You will find many hosting companies offering services for free, but they don’t make any money from this. Then what is the reason that the companies offer free hosting and what is the source of money making?

There is a price for everything, even if you get it for free. Any company promoting itself in the market to attract client finds free hosting the best option. In this way, it demonstrates the value and in the later period, charge the customer fees to make up for every penny it has lost. This is the basis of advertising.

Before going for a free web hosting service, you must know that it is mostly offered by companies that are not much dedicated to manage servers of client’s website. Most of us don’t know that Yahoo, Google and others provide disk space and domain names on their server for free. You can use the free space, but if the load is more then your site could be shut down. This leads to another obvious drawback of free hosting and that is limited resource.

You often get a very small amount of disc space in free hosting. This is only meant for hosting few pages and a very active site can not fit into it.

Load is another serious limitation in getting a free web hosting service. The total amount of bandwidth to be consumed often gets restricted in the case of free hosting. If your site gains popularity and more visitors, your service provider may simply block you or ask you to leave the disk space. Some also provide you a certain amount of bandwidth per month, which means that no body can reach you if the amount gets over before the time period.

If you are getting a free hosting, it means you will be sharing the space with thousands of websites. Their additional load can affect your performance and growth. The only option left is to move on to another server that means dealing with a large number of problem creating issues.

Lack of support is another problem with free hosting. When you are paying for the service, you are sure that you will atleast get some sort of support from the provider. This turns out to be helpful in case of a server hack or failure, correcting the connection problems and other issues. You don’t get any such support in case of web hosting.

If you have taken a free hosting, then the company will only recover their disk or the server only when it completely fails. So, forget about getting the data before that. Therefore, if only a selected portion of the disk has failed or you lost some of the files because of virus, then wait for the complete back up recovery process that could take weeks or even months.

Small site owners do not face such problems. You have easy options of copying everything at a single location or recovering your site data yourself. But, you need to have necessary skills to do the whole process.

The company providing free hosting will also offer you only a few email addresses meant to be used for administration and handful of other tasks. If you have plans to expand beyond that, there is a serious need to consider other options. Most of the email services provided by the host will give you protection against spam and virus. But, only a few service providers offer solutions against some other related issues.

We don’t know that the free hosting providers often ask you to display some advertisement of their company on the web page without paying you anything. Another example of a healthy give and take relationship.

Let’s come to the positives of a free hosting service. If you have just started out, it is a great way to acquire new skills, understand the market and learn about potential pitfalls. With a free hosting service, you get a chance to make a site, maintain and improve it, save it from getting hacked, keeping the back up and polish your other skills.

However, you don’t get the features a commercial site requires after sometime with the free service. If you have plans to grow soon, it is good to use the free service for sometime to enhance your skills and then shift to a better option.

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