Free Web Hosting – Good or Bad?

With the increase in online businesses, the need of web hosting space is also increased. Everyone wants make their site either for personal purpose or for business purpose. There are also many services available in the market that provides free hosting. Are these services reliable and should be used? In this article, we are going to discuss on free web hosting.

With free hosting services, there are many issues attached. The first issue is with the domain name they give. Free hosting providers don’t allow you to choose your own domain names. You will have to select sub domain of the domain name they provide. So your domain name will become lengthier. It’s really hard to remember long domain names.

Another problem is advertising. Free web hosting is free for you but it costs money to the provider. Provider has to make money some way. To make some money, free hosting providers put ads on your web pages. These ads sometimes may be related to your site content or may not be related to your site content. If these ads are not related to your site content, then it creates poor user experience.

There is also an issue of bandwidth. Since it’s free service, you can’t expect too much. You will be provided with limited web space and limited bandwidth. When you reach your quote of bandwidth for the period of month, your site will be put in suspension mode. So nobody will be able to see the pages of your web site.

To make your web site dynamic, you need to have MySQL and PHP support. With free web hosting account, you are not given these technical facilities. Also since it’s a free hosting account, you can’t implement payment gateway on your web site. You can’t trust free hosting account for sensitive data.

The biggest problem I can think of is a suspension of an account. Imagine a situation where you have made your web site, you have given time to promote it and when your web site become famous, your account is disabled for some stupid reason. What will you do? All your attempts to promote your web site is now waste. You can’t do anything.

Free web hosting is not recommended for business purpose. Shared web hosting is available at very cheap rate. I recommend shared web hosting to host any web site.