When first setting up their website or blog many people look at  free web hosting sites. Should you go for this or is it better to pay for your hosting?

Well it really depends on what you are doing. If your site is personal and the performance of the host is not critical and your demands are not high, then  free web hosting sites may be fine, however you need to know what you are doing because support will be limited. If your site is business related you should always go for a paid service.

Free web hosting sites exist for different reasons. They may be advertising supported, they may offer a limited version of a paid package (assuming that you will upgrade), they may be linked to some other service which you pay for and in some cases they are just offering a free service.

However when you use free web service hosting you cannot expect to get the sort of service you would expect from a paid supplier:

Limitations – There may be limits on diskspace, bandwidth, number of domains, number of databases, number of email addresses and number of FTP accounts.

Speed – The speed at which your pages load may be slow as there may be too much competition for the available resources.

Reliability – You cannot expect the 99.9% uptime guarantee you should get from a paid host. Fixing problems with free web hosting may not be a top priority for the supplier.

Support – You cannot expect to be able to telephone the host 24/7 for support. In fact support may be very limited as it is a significant cost. This is a major disadvantage if you are not familiar with hosting.

If you do want to use one of the free web hosting sites you are probably best going for one of the website hosting companies that offer a free very basic hosting plan (to whom the above points on speed and reliability should not apply). This will enable you to easily upgrade if you find the limitations too restrictive. If you want to go this route I would suggest using 000webhost.com.

Alternatively you can set-up a blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com (where you can use your own domain name) or you can have your own “site” on sites like Squidoo or Wetpaint.

Having said that however, if you are serious about having a presence on the web, you will find it best long term to avoid free web hosting sites and get a proper paid service at the outset.

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