Free Web Hosting
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Free web hosting is the ability to setup a web hosting account at no charge to you. Majority of the free web hosting companies compensate for the lack of monthly fees by placing advertising at the top of each page.
The other way that free hosting companies work is that they are ad-free but they bank on you eventually upgrading your hosting plan or selling you some other add-on feature. Another method is to offer you a sub-domain such as yoursite.freewebs.com. This doesn't present the professional look so I would definitely avoid this type of free web hosting.
Advantages Of Free Web Hosting
Really the only advantage that I can think of is the fact that it's free. This may be important when you're starting your first website on a limited budget but it may cause you to lose sales because of advertising on each page or the fact that you don't have a true domain name.
As I mentioned, you can find affordable web hosting for as little as $3.95 per month and have a professional look to it without the advertising plus full access to whatever type of features that you'd like to add.
Disadvantages Of Free Web Hosting
Really the only disadvantage is the fact that often times a free web hosting provider makes up for the loss of revenue by placing advertising on your website.
Also if you select a free web hosting provider that gives you a sub-domain you can't use a domain name that you registered such as YourDomainName.com. This also prevents you from setting up personalized email addresses such as sales@YourDomainName.com.
The last thing to consider is that many companies will offer free web hosting with the idea that eventually you'll need to upgrade your free hosting plan because they give you a very limited amount of space. From there they will charge you a rate that exceeds what you would pay elsewhere.
They bank on this because not many people like to move their hosting accounts to a new provider so rather than change providers and move all of your files you simply pay the higher rate.
A Few Popular Free Web Hosting Providers
Below I've listed a few free web hosting providers that I've run into over the years. I've never personally used any of them but through my experiences I've found that they are quite popular and as far as I know they are reliable providers.
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