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)
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Unbiased Step-by-step Guide on Web-HostingUnbiased Step-by-step Guide on Web-Hosting copyright (c) Pavel Lenshin
No more speeches about importance of your own domain, no more talks about necessity of having paid hosting. If you think your brand domain name and stable hosting with a number of features and absence of ads are not worth, at least, $50-$150 per year, then you probably want to play games, rather than build online business.
Choosing hosting provider is something similar to choosing the place of your off-line office. Despite the fact that it is as easy to enter the URL and go to web-site that is physically located in Sidney as in Oslo, the final role here plays the speed of connection and stability of the hosting itself.
The problem with hosting comes down to the old statute of running ebusiness - that is RESEARCH before ACT! The easiest thing to do online is to pay money, the hardest is to THINK OVER what I'm paying for! That statement is true with hosting also because you can pay, let's say, $35 monthly for some particular hosting service, without notice that in two mouse clicks there is an hosting offer providing two times better services all for $15 per month only, so you will keep on losing services as well as $20 monthly that accumulates up to $240 annually losses as a Fee for not doing hosting research! Besides you should keep your eyes open for very good discounted offers that could save you 30-50% for the first year of payments.
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