Free Web Hosting- Free web hosting is good for some people and not good for others. In this Web Host Ranking article on free web hosting we are going to discuss the advantages of free web hosting and disadvantages of free web hosting. Free Web Hosting!
Free web hosting definitely has its advantages and disadvantages. Not all websites should be hosted on free web hosting plans. In addition to listing the advantages and disadvantages of free web hosting, Web Host Ranking is going to provide you with an alternative to free web hosting.
Advantages of free web hosting:
Price- How can you beat free!!! While most of the free web hosting plans do offer premium upgrades, the basic hosting plans are free.
Subdomain names- When you sign up for free web hosting you typically get free subdomain names. Subdomain names are different than domain names but still an effective tool.
No commitment- Obviously if you don’t pay for web hosting then you aren’t going to have a commitment like you would if you were paying a monthly fee. This is really great for people that are just learning or trying out a certain type of website.
Disadvantages of free web hosting:
Advertisements- The biggest disadvantage to free web hosting is by far the annoying third party advertisements and banners that get placed on your website by the free web hosting provider. Because they aren’t charging you any money for your web hosting the provider has to make money some how. They do this by selling space on your website and keeping the revenue. Not that it is bad enough that they are doing to this your site but how does it look when your competitor has an ad or banner placed on your website!
Lack of features- A lot of free web hosting plans only include the bare minimum hosting features. In fact some of them don’t even include PHP, MySQL, FTP, and many more essential hosting features.
Lack of customer support and care- Free web hosting sites don’t care about you, they only care about themselves. Good luck getting through a call or email to them when you have questions about your site. That would only cost them more money by having to hire more employees.
Unreliable- Free web hosting sites come and go every single day. They are so unreliable that it puts you at great risk. Unless you are using some type of online back up system the minute you upload your data to these sites you are taking the chance of losing it.
With that being said, there are very few good free web hosting sites. In fact, Web Host Ranking would only recommend one of them and we consider them to have the best free web hosting. 20m.com offers some good basic web hosting features and for a very small amount ($2.00 per month) you can get those annoying third party advertisements removed.
A great alternative to free web hosting is cheap web hosting. When it comes to cheap web hosting there are many companies out there but one that needs to be looked at is FatCow. FatCow offers a ton of unlimited hosting features, free domain name, and great customer support for only $3.67 a month. When you factor in the free domain name savings, FatCow is not that much more than free web hosting.
