Free hosting refers to hosting services that are free of charge. Free hosting are often used by newbie webmasters who wants to get 
an idea how web hosting works for them. Some companies offer free hosting for a short amount of time as part of a promotion to attract customers. Free web hosting is not necessarily bad. It also has its benefits to users as well.
The main advantage of free hosting is that users will bear no costs. All you have to do is to spend time building your website and upload it to the free hosting server. Some free hosting companies requires you to upload the files through their website while others allow you to use a FTP program. By using free hosting plan, you will learn about the features of the hosting plan offered by the companies. If you are interested, you can sign up for their commercial hosting plan.
Free hosting sites such as Blogger and WordPress allow you to host unlimited websites. You can create as many blog as you want on Blogger. You can also monetize your site through advertisement placement on Blogger’s blog.
Despite that, free hosting services do not allow you to host your own domain. If you are serious about having a website, you must purchase your own domain. Free hosting services only let users host under their domain name. A site hosted in free hosting will have a URL format such as “abc.freehostingservices.com”. Your site is a subdomain under the free hosting site.
If you use free hosting services, you will be assigned with an email account that is based on the free hosting site domain. On the other hand, if you purchase your own domain and hosting services, the email address will reflect as if coming from your own site. For example, if your main domain on the hosting account is abcdomain.com, your email address will look like customerservice@abcdomain.com. It will be much more professional if you are selling products and services. Customers will never buy from a website hosted on free hosting account because they look spammy.
The free hosting company don’t offer customer service for users of the free hosting services. When your site face problem, you will have to fix it yourself.
Lots of advertisements will display across the web pages hosted on the free hosting account. Customers will be irritated to see the whole page being filled with advertisement. Professional commercial websites don’t display advertisement of other business.
You won’t have control over your website. If you purchase your own hosting services, you can have more control over the domain and server. You can set up your own email accounts. You will be able to perform a lot of tasks for your website including installing scripts, redirect URL, check Awstats and etc.
The free hosting services don’t allow you to add META tags to your website. Without META tag, your site can rank lower in the search engine. It will be difficult to change the file names. You cannot add alt tag to your images. As you can see, it is vital to sign up for a commercial hosting plan.
Related Topics: Free, Hosting, Pros and Cons
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