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As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Free web hosting is no exception. Sure it doesn’t directly cost you any money, but you’ll pay through the nose in time and opportunity cost.
If you build a website, you want people to visit the site. Seems obvious right? Free website hosting handcuffs your ability to drive traffic to your website. Search engines such as Google are one of the best and most efficient ways to drive people to your web pages. Search engines want to display the most credible and relevant sources of information to fulfill their customer’s search query. Unfortunately, search engines have been burned in the past by spam or fraudulent sites hosted on free hosting. To combat this problem, it appears as if search engines have altered their algorithm that decides what websites to display. Free hosted sites are penalized. In addition, it’s rumored some search engines won’t even spider, or place a website in their databases, if it’s hosted with a free hosting provider. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com also “blacklist” IP addresses where fraud has taken place in the past. As fraudsters love free hosting, chances are high your shared free hosting IP address will be on a search engine blacklist. When was the last time you remember seeing a web page hosted by a free web host that had a high search engine ranking? Can’t recall one? Now you know why. Don’t make the same mistake with your website. A website that no one visits is worthless.
The URL for your website on a free host is usually a sub domain. Something like, “www.FreeHostingCompany.com/xxx/xxxxxx/yourwebsitename.” Be honest – your customers or friends aren’t going to remember that URL. If they can’t recall your web address they won’t visit your site. Also, you may want to have an email address with the name of website (
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). With a free web host you can’t do this as you don’t own the domain name.
Many free hosting offers rely on advertising to make money. That’s right; free web hosts can litter your website with intrusive banners, text ads, and annoying pop-ups. And, the free host will keep the revenue from the advertising - not you. There should only be room for one message or advertising strategy on your website – yours!
Free website hosting can be frustrating during the site development process as well. Free hosting has limited capabilities, and limited space. Little disk space, data transfer, file types supported, site building capabilities, etc are all constrained on a free host. The capabilities available will limit your site development to something fairly rudimentary. You won’t have the opportunity to make your site as robust and functional as you’d like.
If you go over the strict system resource quotas a free hosted site will be taken offline in most cases without contacting you. Free website hosting is also known to be unreliable with high down times. Plus, a free host could go out of business. If your free web host disappears, what happens to your website and all its files? It disappears too. And don’t even get me started on customer service, which basically doesn’t exist with a free host. Be prepared to try to resolve any issues by reading FAQs.
Another consideration - you want to own your website content, right? Most folks don’t really know what they’ve signed up for when using free hosting to get their site on the web. The free hosting company can own your content. Yep, that's right. If you’ve put it on their free servers, it’s in their possession. The only way it’s ever otherwise is if the terms say they don't own your content - but don't count on it.
The cost of reliable, quality web hosting has dropped precipitously in the last few years. So much so, it’s amazing to me that free web hosting still exists. Trust me; leave the free hosting to spammers, fraudsters, and internet newbies. Buck up the few dollars a month it takes to host your website the right way. Your time, effort, and credibility are worth it.
Author: This Article was written by a hosting expert at http://www.website-hosting-reviews.net.Website-Hosting-Reviews.net reviews website hosting providers to help you find the best host to meet your website needs. 
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