Hosting Articles

Free Website Hosting ? Is Free Hosting What You Need?

In your search for free hosting for your website, you have probably realized already that there are hundreds, possibly thousands of services on offer. They all want your business, they are all free and superficially it seems they all offer much the same thing.

So how do you choose between them? Does it actually matter which free website hosting company you use, since you are not paying for it anyway? Shouldn't you just go with a free service which has thousands of (presumably) happy customers already, like Geocities, Tripod or Fortunecity?

For the answers to these questions, let's think about what you actually want to do. Whether you are creating an ecommerce site and hope to make some money, or just doing a hobby or special interest site, you want people to actually see your pages on the free hosting site.

This means that you want the free host to serve the pages reliably, with minimum downtime. While no host, paid or free, can guarantee that your site will always be up, you want your pages to be available 99% of the time or more. This is the area where the difference between a free host and a commercial host is most apparent. Check the hosting forums before signing up ? any excessive downtime will be receiving comments and complaints. Or see if you can find an uptime guarantee.

Assuming you want people to see your pages, you need a reasonable bandwidth allocation. Free hosts usually set a limit for each customer for each month, and this limit can range from 500MB to 2GB or more. If you are planning to serve large image files, audio or video, the lower limits will be too small, so that will affect your choice of free host.

In addition, storage space on free hosts is often ridiculously limited ? some are still offering 10MB, which is too low for almost everyone. Such limits are designed to stop users using the free space for image hosting.

Many free website hosting companies don't give you much control of page layouts, because they only allow hosted pages built with their own internal web-based sitebuilders. Unless you have very simple requirements, this type of free hosting is of limited value.

Then there is the advertising which most free hosts will put around, beside, under or over your hosted pages. Nothing suggests 'cheap and unprofessional' about a web site more than excessive advertising unrelated to the content of the page. Most free web hosts can't determine what a hosted page is about, so they slap on general or branding ads for which they are paid per thousand views. If you care about the impression your pages will give to your visitors, try to look at web pages on a particular free host to check if the advertising is acceptable.

You may believe that none of these issues really matter, since you can just take your site away and have it hosted on another free website hosting service if there are any problems. But there are significant drawbacks to this. If you change hosts, you change your URL, and the search engines will need time (usually several months) to find, spider and index your pages, and your traffic is likely to die in the meantime. You'll need to delete the old pages to avoid duplicate content penalties. Users will have bookmarked your pages on the old host, and won't be able to find the new one. And so on.

It is better to select a good free host in the first place, and stay with them. Or even find a cheap paid hosting service ? most people can afford $5 a month, which will now get you very good and reliable hosting, with none of the issues and drawbacks covered above.

Don Break writes about hosting, and getting the best hosting value possible. See his web hosting information site.

Other Article Sites

findabook.com  moneycd.info  a-mortgage.info   about-lemon-laws.info  aboutstudentloans.info
all-about-publishing.info  auctions-articles.info  bestcollege-university.com  bestispconnection.com
biblefolder.com  blogger-website.com  books-used.info  brokers-guide.info  buywindows.info  cable-dsl.info
career-miner.com  carpel-tunnel.info  cashinaflash.info  cashloanreviews.info  casinobell.com  chat-house.info
clearmycredit.info  collegeloantips.info  crones.info  depression-articles.info   dirnic.net  dishguides.info
divers-below.com  expodog.info   financewizz.com  fire-insurance.info  getgood.info  handleit.net   it-idea.info
health-supplies.info  hosting-right.com  insidealert.com  insurance-facts.info  jobs-employment.info
justgood.info  lookgold.net   lowcost-travel.info  money-source.info  myhostzone.info  numisblog.com
peoplesearchfinder.info  pr-articles.info  realeas.com   refinancing-guides.info  spyware-remove.info
telelot.info  the-law.info   toppaid.info  travel-deals.info  travelcorrect.com  wedding-guide-site.com
your-blog.info  your-credit.info

MORE ARTICLES:

Article marketing can increase traffic to your websites
Article marketing can increase traffic to your website or blog. They have a lot to write articles and over time you will see the result of your efforts. Writing so many articles can sometimes authors on the block. Learn how to overcome this obstacle.

Russian Mafia Extorts Gambling Websites
For decades, extortion (for money) has been a powerful weapon for mafia criminals to shakedown lucrative businesses and underworld operations. Extortions by Italian Mafia is legendary ? their tactics ingrained into the American psyche; threats of bloodshed were real. ?Pay us money ? we protect you ? or else.? Nowadays, there?s a new style of extortion and its not done by Italian Mafiosos wearing dark suits and glasses, nor is it done in person. This new-style gangsterism involves extortion of gambling websites carried out in cyberspace by human forces ? forces who speak foreign languages ? communicating demands across the globe.

How to Find Affordable Web Hosting Companies
Finding affordable hosting may be easier than you think Learn how to find the best, most affordable web hosting packages and hosting reviews and resources

11th Annual Webby Awards Unveil Nominees for Best Websites, Videos, and Ads of the Year
Starting today, public can vote for favorites in The Webby People’s Voice Awards presented by Verizon.

Leigh Steinberg and Alfred DiMora to Host Super Bowl Party
The Leigh Steinberg Super Bowl Party again promises to be a highlight of Super Bowl Weekend. Celebrities from the sports, automotive, business, and entertainment worlds will gather on the Grand Floridian Yacht in Hollywood, Florida, for the event, co-hosted by Alfred DiMora, creator of the $2 million Natalia SLS 2 sport luxury sedan.

FitWatch Inc. Launches MyJigglyBits.com, a Fun, User-Driven Way to Find the Most Useful Weight Loss Websites
MyJigglyBits.com uses the power of the weight loss community to sift through the overabundance of weight loss websites. A vote-based system pushes the best and most useful weight loss websites to the top of the heap.

Traxi Technologies to Host Unified Communications Seminar on October 18, 2007 in New York, NY
Traxi Technologies will host: " Unified Communications: Innovative Communications with Revolutionary Economics". The seminar will focus on how Unified Communications will enhance productivity and cut costs.

National Non-Profit, EyeCare America, and the Maryland Society of Eye Physicians & Surgeons Host Finish Line Celebration for ?EyeRide for Sight? Cycli
Cross country ride raised more than a half a million dollars for blindness prevention programs.

Web Hosting Forums: The Best Technical Support Team Around
In the internet, virtually thousands of web hosting companies offer different attractive packages for the worldwide market. Because of this, searching for the best web-hosting provider can be overwhelming and confusing.

Free Website Hosting Vs. Paid Website Hosting Basics
Web site hosting service companies on the Internet permit the user to make their web site accessible through the World Wide Web. There are huge numbers of companies that offer web space on their server for their customers and also offer Internet connectivity in general in a data center. There can be various types of web site hosting companies. The main classification is the free web site hosting and the paid web site hosting service companies.

Web Hosting Geeks : How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Service?
One of the most crucial decisions that most online businesses have to make is choosing the best web hosting service. With a popular or well known and reliable Internet Service Provider (ISP) you won?t face many problems, however with a poor web hosting service provider it can be a nightmare.

Chestnut Street Inn Celebrates Second Anniversary By Hosting Open House
Owners Jeff and Monika Sudakov celebrate the completion of their second year of innkeeping by hosting an annual open house at the Chestnut Street Inn.

NetQoS and Cisco to Host WAN Optimization Webcast
Forrester Research Senior Analyst Robert Whiteley will discuss success factors in deploying WAN optimization and measuring application performance improvements during a webcast to be held on Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2007, at 2:00 p.m. EST.

WhyBuy.com Serves as Free Online Rental Directory for Rental Websites
Listing Rental Items Online is Now Made Easier Due to the Free, Fully Optimized Website

Looking For Your E-Commerce Web Hosting Plan
It?s true that hosting your e-commerce website is not always easy because many web hosts simply cannot provide everything you are looking for. Luckily, there are plenty of options out there so that you can find exactly what you need and more. When it comes to your e-commerce web-hosting plan, there is no need to compromise or settle for something less than what you want or need.