Friday, October 24, 2008

Should You Use Free Hosting?

Need a place to host your website? If you're looking, chances are you've come upon offers for free website hosting. However, there are definite drawbacks to using a free hosting service.

Other people's ads will be on your space. Many free hosting providers make their money by putting ad space on their client sites.

You won't get a domain name of your own. Most free hosts don't give you a unique name; you're stuck with a subdomain of their own.

You won't show up on search engines. A big drawback of free hosting is that sites hosted for free often don't rank well in search engines.

Free hosting can hurt credibility. To those who know a little about websites, it's obvious when a site is being hosted for free.

You don't get much space or functionality. Most free hosting programs allow you to have only a small number of pages on your site.

Dependability can be a problem. Free hosts aren't always the most dependable. You could get unexplained down time, so your site won't always be accessible.

Free website hosting fits every budget, but you get what you pay for. If you're building an e-commerce business or even putting up a simple website to advertise an offline business, you are much better served finding a paid host. A professional hosting site is a much more solid and dependable foundation on which to build your online reputation. So think about investing in good hosting, and you won't regret that you did.

Chris Smith is sales director for http://www.on365.co.uk a UK based data center Management Company and Server Rooms Specialists. For more information on server rooms see http://www.on365.co.uk/Server-Room-Solutions.aspx

No comments: