Among the many decisions you will have to make when choosing a hosting package is
whether to go with a free service or a paid service. Although both methods will
get a website on the net there are many differences which will impact your site.
A free hosting packages sounds very attractive but it is important to understand
how the company makes money. Paid services make money from the money paid for the
hosting service. Free services make money from ads that are placed on each of the
pages that they host. You do not have a choice to display these ads or not.
The biggest advantage of a free hosting package is that it is inherently free. Being
that it is free this would make it a very attractive choice for beginners, since
the costs are low, the risks are low. Another advantage, primarily for beginners
is that these free hosts usually have very easy to use, integrated website tools
that will assist you in setting up your site.
Aside from these advantages there are some limitations of free hosting that you
should be aware of. Most importantly is that search engines typically don't rank
these sites as high, and if the search engines aren't on your side, drawing traffic
will be a lot more difficult. Another disadvantage is that most free web hosting
companies will disallow you from placing ads on your own site. This means 100% of
the ad revenue from your site goes to the host company. Also, in most cases with
a free hosting package, you will not have your own
domain name. Your domain name will be something similar to yoursite.hostingcompany.com,
which gives your site less credibility and again will help market the host company
and not yours. And finally, just like any hosting package, double check the limitations
on things like bandwidth and disk space.
Paid services on the other hand, gives you a lot more control over your site. If
you're running a personal website, not showing any ads is a nice luxury to have.
If you're running a business, you get the extra ad revenue from the traffic you
worked hard for. With paid hosing you also get a lot more flexibilty in the kinds
of technology and tools you want to use. Extra software, like forums or rss can
easily be included into your site.
Summary
The free web hosting is good for beginners to the net. It is a low cost low risk
way of introducing you to owning your own web site. Beyond beginner use, and figuring
in the super low costs of basic web hosting, paid hosting is the way to go if you
want to create a serious business or a site with significant traffic.