SEO Blog and Web Hosting News

Archive for the ‘Free Hosting’ Category

If you are a newcomer in the land of the WWW or World Wide Web, you definitely must be wondering about many aspects of the functioning of the web and what are the best possible ways to project your website or domain on the Internet. The best bet for starters, of course, if ‘free web hosting’.

Free web hosting is good, if you are new and want to learn the ropes first hand. It is definitely not a good idea if you are starting a dot.com business. So, what do you get with a free web hosting provider?

First of all you will get a web space on the net FREE OF COST. This is quite a big plus point. Another plus point is that it will provide you with a free email account in most cases. The downside would be that you will not have the permission to have your domain name. You cannot get any technical support for your database, nor can you accept advertisements.

Hence, if you are hosting your web just to post out a few ideas, a hobby broadcast site, or similar things, and then definitely you can choose a free web-hosting provider. Free web hosting is good for those with low traffic. For example you may like to have your website so your friends and family can access and exchange ideas with you. Or just plain curious to see how things work out when you are out there, posting on the Internet.

It is definitely not advisable for a person who wants to run or launch a business on the net, however rosy the free web-hosting provider would paint it. No free web-hosting provider will offer you free traffic transfer space and hence your business will be doomed, or you will end up with huge traffic transfer charges. So also, you would loose out in terms of visitors if and when the server is not up to the mark and has an uptime less than 95%. Poor technical support would be another major obstacle if you have heavy traffic to your website, as any interruption would frustrate your visitors chasing them away from your website.

Besides, the point that would decide anyone who runs a web-based business NOT to choose a free web hosting, is that the company would look cheap and amateurish. The host of your free website will impose advertisements on your website, which you may not like. There are a lot of downside points. A few are enumerated below:

•No tech support
•No guarantee on server uptime
•No free traffic transfer space
•No access to cgi and/or perl script
•No advertisement for money can be hosted on your free website
•No sub-directories
•No secure server for credit card payments
•Very low SEO visibility as search engines bypass free sites often

Having gone through the above, I still reiterate that for beginners who want to see what it looks like to be on the web, for those who want to share things with family and friends, and for hobby purposes, free web hosting is a good option. For any other reason, by all means go for a professional web hosting service.

If you are just looking into getting your feet wet in the area of web hosting, it may be tempting to take up one of the various offers from sites who are offering free web hosting services. They offer a certain type of site with a certain list of amenities and you have to go through a series of changes to make your free web host offer work to your advantage.

Free web hosting companies make their money differently than the average web hosting company, that charges you a set amount for your site. They usually make their money offering you a poor site with the option of upgrading to a whole new site, which of course is not free. If this is not the case, these free web hosting sites place banners and pop up ads all around your site, and that is the way they make most of their money.

With the latter usually being the case with free web hosting sites, ask yourself who these companies are to be making any profit off of your traffic? If people travel to your site and decide to click on certain sponsors, that should count towards the pennies in your pocketbook, not theirs. If you are not depending on yoru site to generate traffic and any type of income or reward for you, free web hosting may be okay for you. If you at all depend on your website for your financial stability and survival, forget about being cheap and pay for a good quality web host. That way, any ads that are found on your site are ads that you are aware of and that pay you for traffic you direct from your site to theirs.

There are numerous web hosting services and free web hosting services on the web. A great deal of the free web hosting sites offer adequate web hosting for a price in lieu of the generic, free version.

Free web hosting is a service that stores your website and offers to delivers its web pages to the Internet for free. Thus, free hosting for your website actually offers you to increase your online business opportunities. Just as you want to get your website hosted in Internet, similarly there are customers out there who want to know more about your company. Free hosting suggests web hosting services that are free, and are usually advertisement-supported and of limited functionality.
Features of free web hosting

Free web hosts will start by providing you a sub domain [http://yourname.example.com] or a directory [http://www.example.com/yourname]. Since free hosts allow the use of separately purchased domains so they do not operate as domain name registrar. The free hosts are advantageous because they have a basic package for free and also enhanced packages [obviously with more features] that you have to purchase with a cost. This allows the users to try the services for an initial trial and then upgrade it in their websites, if needed.

The free hosts provide the following extra features:

 File transfer via FTP
 Allows some of the scheduled processes like cronjobs
 A web based control panel
 Free email accounts for subdomains and domain hosted
 Scripting languages like ASP and PHP
 Allows relational databases

When you are searching for a free web host, you should make sure that the hosts have an excellent track record. You should enquire into the storage facilities allowed by the host and see how much the free host can provide you with web control panels and password protected directories for your website.

Methods of free web hosting

There are a few methods of giving out free web hosting to people by web hosts, which are as follows:

- Instant activation – these hosts usually give very little storage space and bandwidth allowances. They require the user’s web page to display their banner ads, or pop-ups, text link ads or the user’s files to be uploaded through a web-based file manager.

- Post for hosting – this is more popular as it allows one to register at Web shots forum, which usually has lots of banner or popup Ads – and post there for Free web hosting. One has to stay active and meet certain requirements almost every month/week to keep up their level of web hosting.

- Posting in forums – some of the free hosts allow posting in a forum. It requires users to either reach a certain amount of posts before getting a free hosting account or be an active contributor in the forum. These forum-based free hosting factors often work on a system of points where posts points to a user and are basically used as credits towards getting a hosting account.

Limitations of free web hosting

But free hosting has the following limitations:

- Prevents hot linking of files
- Fails to provide any type of uptime guarantee
- Do not allow file types like MP3, MPEG and others
- Provides very small bandwidth per month as compared to paid hosting
- Allows very limited size of hosted files