|
Free or paid web hosting?
Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look
for some hosting and make a choise. Your first qustion 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 http://username.freehost.com
or http://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 loose 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 bandwith 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 wihtout
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 choises - pay them or loose 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 loose 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 then on free host. Some paid
hosts offer uptime guarantee.
(+) Paid hosts usually offer enough disk space and bandwith.
Futures like PHP and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not
programmer you can download plenty of free PHP scripts from
internet.
(-) Paid hosting coast 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 free
host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run serious business
website, need PHP, database and don't want ads on the site
I recommend to look for quality paid host.
About the Author
Petr Sejba runs Web Hosting Reviews (http://webhostingtoplist.com),
a list of quality low coast hosting companies. For more information
contact him at info*at*webhostingtoplist*dot*com.
|
