Paid vs. Free Web Hosting

Lets admit it, no one wants to pile down on a couple hundreds on their first website. However, the quality of web hosting that you receive is defined by how much you paid in disk space, bandwidth, web control, backups, and customer support. Are you willing to exchange all that to just save a few measly dollars every month? There is no such thing as free customer support. That is why when you go with free web hosting, you are left hanging when you run into any situation most of the time. Not to say, you are by your self most of the time.

Free Web Hosting

Free hosting sure does have it’s reasons as being a secondary industry to web hosting companies, as they are able to pull in revenue with forced ads, mess with your website content, and all that sort of nasty things. And not to say, they could careless about your site being up or not. In my eyes, free web hosting was made just to help build up the foundation of the site, just to get more quality backlinks from webmasters who don’t know better, and messing them up. I have heard many dreaded horror stories of certain business man putting all their files on a free web host, to find out that he had lost them the next day. This is not to make a stereotype against all free web hosting, but just to show the comparison of how much as little as supplying your web host $5/m, can change in terms of quality of service. I’ll list the pros and cons for free web hosting and paid.

Pros:

• It is free
• Great for practice websites

Cons:

• No guarantee that your site will be up the next day
• Possibly forced ads
• A permanent link displayed somewhere on the page
• Restrictions
• Lower customer service
• Risk of data loss
• Less disk space & bandwidth

Paid Web Hosting

You can already assume whats in store for paid web hosting, as it is like the exact flip side of whats con for free web hosting with a few exceptions.

Pros:

• Promised uptime % or money back guarantees most of the time
• Priority customer service
• More bandwidth and disk space to play around with
• Competition = better service
• Free back ups
• No forced ads or permanent links
• Faster loading time – most of the time

Cons:

• It costs money

If you still decide to take on free web hosting, you must realize what you are trading in, in terms of service and management. If you plan to pay your web host, they are in debt to you in providing quality service, if you don’t pay your web host, they are in debt to nobody.