I want free hosting!

by George Pratsos

When I started with my on-line ventures (and don’t imagine anything spectacular….it was just a blog), I was thinking to myself: “Why would anyone want to buy hosting when there are hundreds of free web hosting providers?” 

That might be true if you are only going to work on a blog or a very small website but even then things are not so “free” or easy as they seem to be. You’ll soon find out that free webhosting has huge limitations for someone looking to do some serious business online.

The biggest issue people come across with free hosts is that one minute they are there and the next they are gone. Not all are like that, but it’s not unusual to find that someone has set up reseller account with the hope to make some money from advertising, only to find out that this model is not viable. Which brings us to disadvantage number 2: free hosts run their own ads on your website. Well…they have to make some money from somewhere so they’ll pack your site with Google Adsense, banners etc. Won’t look good on your neat website. Other frequent technical limitations are:

• You cannot host more than one (if any) domains
• You cannot have more than 1 or 2 databases hosted
• Small disk space
• Not much bandwidth (use too  much and your account will get suspended)
• You cannot upload files larger than e.g. 500KB (is that enough to upload your Wordpress blog database?)

All of the above might not be a big deal if you are starting out with something small but you’ll soon find out that it’s stopping you from doing what you want.

What I found to be the biggest disadvantage is support. Who will provide decent support for next to nothing? No one.

Go ahead and experiment with free hosting but don’t get all cozy with it. Make sure you take frequent backups (e.g. of your blog database or your website files) and then jump to a reliable web host when you feel it’s time to do some serious business.

Oh, and don’t forget to look at environmentally responsible hosting….Green is always good.