You may think you’ll be taking advantage of a really great deal if you set up your website on a free hosting site, but be sure to consider the pros and cons before doing so.
You may think you’ll be taking advantage of a really great deal if you set up your website on a free hosting site, but be sure to consider the pros and cons before doing so.
Even if money is tight, you may do yourself a greater service by choosing a paid site instead. It all depends on what the needs of your site are, and what impression you’re trying to create with visitors. For anyone who does have a tight budget there are always options rather than going for a free service.
You can be hosting a business website on a shared web server right now at Hostgator for as little as $3.96 a month which is very affordable and cheap web hosting to anyone wanting to start a small business online.
Free Website Hosts May Give The Wrong Impression
First impressions will be more important if you are putting up a business site than if it’s a personal one.
For a business site, appearance as well as features will be almost equally important, because if visitors are turned off by what they see on your page, they’re not likely to come back and do business with you.
People coming to a personal site will probably be looking for different things.
This means that a key consideration in the “free versus paid” deliberation will be that most free hosts will place advertising on your site. This may not be such an issue if the ads somehow relate to your type of business, and there might be room for negotiation on that issue with the hosting service. But that usually won’t be the case, so you’ll end up with banner or pop-up ads promoting businesses other than yours, placed on your own website.
Not only will this restrict how your site is designed, but what you could be saying to visitors is, “My business can’t afford its own website.” That’s probably not the impression you want to create. You could try a free hosting site that claims to be ad-free, but those tend not to be very long-lived. In fact, most free sites, with ads or without, are usually a little precarious. This, too, is something to consider if you’re putting up a business site and don’t want to keep having to move it around.
You May Be Restricted In What Design You Can Have
But speaking of design, that’s another limitation you may find on free web hosts. Many of them require that you use only their templates when designing your web pages. This will restrict the freedom to create the best representation of your online business. For a personal website, this probably won’t matter as much, unless you want to get really creative.
The considerations go much deeper than these design issues, however. For example, how will you get your pages onto the site?
If you’re restricted to using the host’s templates, you may have to design the pages right on the site. Yet most serious internet businesses need the flexibility to be able to design their own pages and upload them from anywhere on the net, via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). And what are the disk space and bandwidth limitations? These are often more restricted on free sites than on paid ones.
You also need to consider the Search Engine Optimization implications to using a free site and being restricted by their templates. If not enough to simply upload a page and expect to receive traffic from it you need to be able to update and tweak your site to get he best results.
What Options Will You Have On A Free Website Host
- Can you run PHP and Perl scripts, to perform extra operations?
- Will you have MySQL so you can run a blog?
- Can you have a Shopping Cart?
Many of these tools will be essential to run and hopefully expand your internet business. While these aren’t automatically found on every paid hosting site, they tend to be much more restricted on free hosts. Even if you do have PHP and Perl capability on a free site, sometimes the circumstances for using them are so regimented that they’re not really useful.
Tech support is another very crucial consideration with web site hosting. You’ll need to know that you have support whenever you need it, especially on a business site. A personal web page can be down for a day or so until you can get help, but this circumstances could be disastrous for your business.
You need to know your web host will support you reliably.
Whether you’re planning a personal website or a business site, you will need to weigh up the pros and cons of “free versus paid” when it comes to web hosting. If your business is very simple, you might manage on a free website host for a while but as you grow you will need to consider paid hosting to give your business more credibility.
But in the end, you may find that while a free website host will suit a personal website’s needs quite well, a business really should go with a paid site to be successful. That’s why we use and recommend Hostgator we fully understand that it is not an Australian hosting company, however it is the best website host we have used and will continue to use. To learn more about how we can help you succeed online please visit our services page.
