The Upsides And Downsides of Free Web Hosting

Posted by - May 21, 2011 - Free Web Hosting, Web Hosting - No Comments

There are loads of websites online offering free hosting. Examples of these are Four Zero,  BlinkWeb, X10, and Weebly. The main goal for these sites is helping you make money, and once you do, then you can upgrade to having a paid account there. The choice to use them is yours to make, but you should understand the upsides and downsides before making your decision.

Upsides

It’s FREE! One thing very appealing about these sites is that it costs you nothing. A lot of people who are just coming online don’t know what they’re doing, or if they’ll be a success. So they find themselves skeptical about paying for things they aren’t sure about. So these free sites give them a great way of testing the water.

Learning Experience – The main goal is to get some experience in making money online. This way, they hope you become one of their paying customers, so free hosting services provide you with lots of training, step by step instructions, to help you get to that point. Yola and BlinkWeb are two good ones for helping you launch out into the deep.

Downsides

High Fees For Hosting - You can upgrade at any time to having a paid account, but truthfully, the price you’ll pay will be greater than if you bought your hosting from a good hosting company. I have found that BlueHost is one of the most reliable hosts online, and highly recommend them.

Control - Yet another downside is the amount of control you have in regard to your website’s layout. You’ll be given several different layouts that you have a tiny bit of control over, but very limited. Additionally, you don’t own your site design, and if you ever change over to a different provider, you’ll have to begin the whole process over again.

Downtime - One really important downside it that many free hosts aren’t so reliable. When you depend on your site being readily available, and it goes down, you can lose more than just money, you can lose reliability and credibility as an entrepreneur.

I hope this information helps you with your decision about free hosting or finding some cheap hosting elsewhere. Honestly, they’re great to play around with and get a feel for how things work, but I wouldn’t sink my future monetary goals into one. It’s best to just get good reliable hosting right from the start, like BlueHost, and grow within a good hosting system.