A quick search on google for web hosting reveals plenty of free web hosting services. So, why would you pay for it when you can get it for free? It’s a very good question. But is anything really free? You have to ask why you can get it for free, when most businesses pay for their hosting. If you concluded there must be some drawbacks to free hosting, you would be right.
The host may place adverts on your site. You tend to have limited disk space and bandwidth, and if you don’t, the resources are heavily oversubscribed, which means your site may load slowly. You are unlikely to get uptime guarantees, which means your site could go down often. You are unlikely to get support or many of the tools you need bundled-in with your account. But if you are just starting out as a webmaster and dipping your toes in the water, it’s worth trying a free webhost. Absolutely free hosting lists 70 free web hosts.
A good alternative is to setup a blog. Blogs can be customised to look like a website, especially wordpress. And setting up wordpress or blogger is a snap, with lots of help available. You can use wordpress or blogger. Posterous is even easier. You can setup a blog in minutes, customise it and even send your content to it by email. Many webmasters don’t realise just how versatile blogs can be. There are plenty of wordpress-based websites that don’t look like blogs at all.
But if you want my opinion, you should pay for your hosting. It really is not expensive. Hostgator gives you unlimited, space, bandwidth and sites, 99.9% uptime, sitebuilder and 24/7/365 support for just $8 a month. For what you get, it’s very cheap. And hostgator is one of the largest and established hosting businesses on the Internet. So if you are building a business for the long-term, hostgator will still be around, something you cannot guarantee with a free hosting service.
For my websites, it’s paid hosting every time.
