To the amateur website owner, free hosting probably sounds like a fantastic idea. You get to have your website and enjoy it too, right?
Wrong. Hosting providers offer free hosting plans to meet
their needs, not yours. As a result, you will end up being dissatisfied with your plan, and what you thought would save you money might even end up costing you more.
Advertising: You know what they say – you don’t get anything for free. If you read the small print of the agreement for your free hosting plan, you’ll see what I mean. Many hosting providers pay for their free hosting plans with advertising revenue. As a result, your hosting plan isn’t really free – you’re trading advertising space on
your site for your hosting provider’s services.
The down side: Who wants to wade through advertisements just to read your website? And you better believe your hosting provider isn’t going to make the ads attractive or discreet – after all, those ads are paying your way, and your provider wants to make sure they do their job!
Limited server space and bandwidth: Most free plans offer very limited server space and bandwidth. Those who are setting up a website for the first time don’t notice, though, because they either don’t understand what these things are, or how quickly even a moderately successful website can eat into your quota.
The down side: At first you might not notice how little storage space your website has, or how little traffic it can handle. Unfortunately, just as your website is taking off, you
will notice – and that is the absolute last time you want to risk your website becoming unavailable because of exceeded quotas.
A stepping stone to outrageously expensive services: Oftentimes, hosting companies use free hosting plans to draw customers. “But, wait!” you say. “They’re not
paying customers!” Unfortunately, the system is rigged so that they
will become paying customers. The two pitfalls already mentioned – ugly advertising and confining quotas – ensure that most free hosting customers will upgrade to paid hosting plans, and usually sooner rather than later.
The down side: The problem with this setup is that companies that provide free hosting services usually also charge an arm and a leg for their upgraded hosting plans. They do this simply because they can: by offering free hosting plans, they are backing their customers into a corner. It’s a major hassle to change hosting companies once you have established your website, so you are more likely to simply upgrade your free plan to a more expensive one, despite the excessive rates.
The moral of the story: A free hosting plan may sound like a good deal to begin with, but you will quickly find that you pay for it over and over again with hassles over advertising, storage space, and traffic quotas. Even worse, most people who start out with a free hosting plan find that they end up spending more than if they had simply picked out a good, fairly-priced hosting plan from the very beginning.
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