Free Web Hosting
Free website hosts are those webhosts which provide free of charge a website address and some online webspace enabling you to quickly upload your site for everyone to see.
The reason that the hosting is free, is usually because the free webhost will make money from your visitors by placing advertisements on your website.
A recent popular way that free hosts earn revenue is by providing free hosting to people who actively post on their forum. Revenue is earned this way from adds places on the forum itself.
Free web hosting is a lot slower, less reliable and has a lot less features than professional hosting.
I will compare my webhost's features where all of my websites are located costs only US$5.95 per month with a typical free webhost.
US$5.95 / Month Webhost |
Typical Free Webhost |
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Many people will advise you to start off with a free webhost just to test your site and get it up and running before you spend money on a professional webhost. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of doing so.
Free Web hosting Advantages
It’s free! Yes that’s right. A free webhost will not cost you a cent. This is a risk free way to start you on your way.
Easy to use web based design tools. Free webhosts such as http://geocities.yahoo.com/ and http://freewebs.com provide professionally developed, simplistic online webdesign tools.
Practice makes perfect. Free hosts give you a free chance to practice designing webpages.
Free Web hosting Disadvantages
Most annoy visitors with unnecessary advertising. Some hosts provide hosting without forced adds, but others will pop up in front of your visitors.
Not much traffic is supported. If your site starts to become popular then you risk using your free bandwidth limit, which would result in your site being closed until the end of the month. $5 per month give you enough traffic allowance to not worry about bandwidth, as long as you are not hosting large, frequently downloaded files or movies.
You may loose traffic! Over time you will begin to get links to your site and search engines will begin to index (list you in their results). If this happens and you then decide to change to a professional webhost or your account gets closed then you will lose all of your page rank, traffic and you will need to wait all over again for your site to be indexed by search engines.
Many free hosts unfortunately have an inactivity limit. For example if no activity is detected on your website for a period of 30 days your accounts may be deleted. While
You will miss out on important features. If you are not particularly experienced at webdesign then tools such as ‘Free Site Builder’ (an automated way of quickly building a site), are very handy when initially setting your website up.
Where to get free web hosting
- Free web hosting Directory - List of Free Web hosting providers
- Free web hosts at the Open Directory Project
- Free Web Hosting Providers in the Yahoo! Directory
- Directory of Free Hosting Services - Only features hosting providers that do not advertise on user pages