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# 398 Free or paid web hosting?
Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look for some hosting
and make a choice. Your first question probably will be whether to choose free
or paid hosting service. Let's have a look at some advantages and disadvantages
of these solutions.
Free web hosting:
(+) It's for free. You don't need to pay for domain name.
(-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username.
As I noticed above, the advantage is that you don't need to pay for domain. But
note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can
lose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this
problem but it is not the point of this article).
(-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages - usually 1 or 2
banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your
site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn't allow
it.
(-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwidth then paid hosts and a lot of them
don't offer futures like PHP and MySQL.
(-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time. If
your free host offers hosting without ads now, don't be surprised when banner or
popup appears on your site in the future.
(-) Sometimes happens that free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer
paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choices - pay them or lose your
website.
Paid web hosting:
(+) You can host your own domain. If you decide to change the web hosting
provider in the future, you easily transfer the domain to the new provider and
don't lose your traffic.
(+) Most paid hosts offer 24/7 support via email or live chat and some of them
provide toll-free phone support.
(+) You can expect better uptime than on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime
guarantee.
(+) Paid hosts usually offer enough disk space and bandwidth. Futures like PHP
and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not a programmer you can download plenty
of free PHP scripts from internet.
(-) Paid hosting costs money :o)
Before you make the decision if choose free or paid host you should answer this
question: How big ambitions do I have with my website? If you are starting small
personal page for your friends consist of a few *.html files, then a free host will
be sufficient. In case you plan to run a serious business website, need PHP,
database and don't want ads on the site, I recommend to look for quality paid
host.
--
Petr Sejba runs Web Hosting Reviews (
webhostingtoplist.com ), a list of quality low coast hosting companies.
For more information contact him at info*at*webhostingtoplist*dot*com.
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