There are a number of providers out there offering free web hosting services. Before you start spending hours on setting up your website with them, here are some tips to help you make sure you know what you’re getting into.
First of all, understand why these services are free. They’re able to run their business without charging you anything because they sell advertising space on their websites. That means your site, whether you like it or not, is going to have ads on it. You should be ok with that before you go any further.
If you don’t mind ads on your site, you should at least try and find ads that will blend well into your site. For instance, will the company give you any control over where the ads go and what colour they appear? The best case scenario is when a provider just gives you the ad code and you can paste it wherever you want. Also, are the ads targeted? If your website is an ecommerce site that sells baby clothes, think about how your visitors would feel if they saw ads for cars or the like. You want to go with a provider that will target their ads more directly to the content on your site. Also, never ever ever and I mean ever sign up with a provider that uses popups for its ads. They’re ugly, they’re annoying, and I know I, personally, would never come back to your site.
As you can see, free web hosting has its pitfalls. Another one would be the URL that you’re going to get stuck with. Especially if you’re running a business, you want a website address that people will be able to remember and one that isn’t too hard to spell. With most free providers, you’re going to get stuck with an address that likely you won’t even remember. Of course, you can pay a third party to buy a simple domain and forward visitors to your other site, but then it won’t be free anymore, will it?
Free providers generally don’t provide that much bandwidth either, so you want to be careful before signing up with them. If you’re planning on running a small operation, then it might suffice. But, if you’re planning on running a full-scale ecommerce operation and you hope to have visitors in the thousands, you’re going to want to have that extra capacity just in case.
Finally, and just for fun, check out the websites of any potential providers you’re looking at. Is their own site professional? Or does it look like it was also just a free pre-designed template? If they don’t have the skills to run their own website, then I wouldn’t trust them with running mine. And, if they couldn’t even pay the few hundred dollars to have a professional designer set up their site, then I wouldn’t consider themselves serious about their business.
For more information about free web hosting services, visit 1 and 1 Internet.
To learn more about this author, visit Web Hosting's Website.
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