Free or Paid Web Hosting?

Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look for some hosting and make a choice. Your first question will probably be whether to choose a 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 a domain name.
• (-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username. As I noted 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 these are beyond the scope of this article).
• (-) Your provider will probably include ads on your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site, read their terms and conditions carefully. Some free hosts don't allow it.
• (-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwidth than paid hosts and a lot of them don't offer features like PHP and MySQL.
• (-) A lot of free hosts change their terms and conditions. If your free host offers hosting without ads now, don't be surprised when banner or popups appear on your site in the future.
• (-)Occasionally, free hosts cancel their free service and only 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 your web hosting provider in the future, you can easily transfer the domain to your 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 than on free hosts. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantees.
• (+) Paid hosts usually offer plenty of disk space and bandwidth.
• (+) Features like PHP and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not a programmer, you can download plenty of free PHP scripts from internet.
• (-) Paid hosting costs money :o)

Before you make the decision to choose free or paid hosting, you should answer this question: What ambitions do I have for my website? If you are starting a small personal page for your friends that consists of a few .html files, then free host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run a serious business website, need PHP, database and don't want ads on your site I recommend you look for a quality paid host.