Free Hosting - What Are The Drawbacks?

A great place for anyone to start would seem to be that of using free hosting as an easy method of getting their first site off the ground. It looks as though there is absolutely no way you could lose out by using free hosting as you aren’t paying anything whatsoever. However, when looking at the bigger picture it can be easy to see that you may actually be losing out in a big way!

With free-web hosting you are almost certainly going to be getting Ads put on you site. This is the Web Hosts way of making money from you in spite of the fact that you aren’t paying a monthly sum of money for the hosting. This can have several drawbacks.

The first of these is fairly obvious and it is that if you are getting a lot of traffic to your site then the Web hosting company will be making a lot of money from the ads whereas you are not. For instance, if you send over a healthy dose of traffic to your newly launched site then the hosting company may be getting a lot of clicks on the ads they are placing on your site.

Let’s suppose that they are making $200.00 from those Ads in the month. Now if you were to spend $5.00 per month on getting proper Ad Free hosting then you could be making that $200.00 instead of the hosting company. Therefore, you may be losing $195.00 per month by not being willing to pay for hosting. That certainly doesn’t make good business sense. Admittedly, these numbers are all just theoretical, however, it is definitely a point well worth paying attention to.

Another issue is that you may have no control over the content of the Ads being displayed on your site. They may not be to your liking and this could also lose you the credibility you are trying really hard to gain with your website audience.

With Free Web hosting the support and service that you get will also be a lot less than that experienced with a paid service. If you are experienced with websites then this may not be a problem but if you are not then it is well advised to get a package that will really support your needs. If you are an experienced webmaster then it is also extremely unlikely that you would even consider forfeiting the benefits of paid hosting for the sake of a few dollars saved per month.

In summary it could be said that free web hosting is a decent option for the cash strapped beginner. However, on further inspection it should maybe be questioned that if you can’t afford a few dollars a month for a proper hosting account then should you really be starting at all?