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Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look for some hosting
and make a choice.
Your first question probably will be whether to choose free or paid hosting
service. Let's have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.
Free web hosting:
(+) It's for free. You don't need to pay for domain name.
(-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username.
As I noticed above, the advantage is that you don't need to pay for domain.
But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you
can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this
problem but it is not the point of this article).
(-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners,
sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read
carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn't allow it.
(-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwidth then paid hosts and a lot of them
don't offer futures like PHP and MySQL.
(-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time.
If your free host offers hosting without ads now, don't be surprised when banner
or popup appears on your site in the future.
(-) Sometimes happens that free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer
paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choices - pay them or loose
your website.
Paid web hosting:
(+) You can host your own domain. If you decide to change the web hosting provider
in the future, you easily transfer the domain to the new provider and don't
loose your traffic.
(+) Most paid hosts offer 24/7 support via email or live chat and some of them
provide toll-free phone support.
(+) You can expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime
guarantee.
(+) Paid hosts usually offer enough disk space and bandwidth. Futures like PHP
and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not programmer you can download plenty
of free PHP scripts from internet.
Before you make the decision if choose free or paid host you should answer
this question: How big ambitions do I have with my website? If you are starting
small personal page for your friends consist of a few *.html files then free
host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run serious business website, need
PHP, database and don't want ads on the site I recommend to look for quality
paid host.
About the Author
Petr Sejba is the owner of Marble Host (www.MarbleHost.com), reliable web hosting
service offering Free Domain, 99.9 % uptime guarantee, 24/7 support with 1 hour
response guarantee, enough disk storage, huge traffic allowance, web site builder
and more. |
