Free Website Hosting - Pros and Cons

If you are just a beginner in the online world and you want to start your own website, then you should be pleased to hear it that you can access free website hosting services. Now that you are aware of this, the second thing you will want to do is compare these free hosting services with the paid ones as there are pros and cons to both. Paid website hosting offers bigger bandwidth and bigger disk space but the downside is that you have to pay for it. Free website hosting is better in this regard but offers you less freedom. The choice really depends on what you need from your website and how much time and money you have available to you.

The biggest advantage of free hosting sites is you can easily start your web hosting service without spending a single penny. By using free web hosting services, you don’t have to learn about online file manager, you FTP, uploading files and the many other things that are crucial to know with paid website hosting. In this way, free website hosting is friendlier when it comes to those who are just starting out. You will get instant access to your free web hosting account after registration. Now you are all set to earn money by using the content of your website.

But everything is not as beautiful as it looks; there are several demerits of using free web hosting services.

The biggest drawback about free web hosting services is the advertisement from free web hosting services. These free website hosting providers need to earn some good money to stay in the business and therefore they put banners on your website so that they can earn more. It’s possible that some of the providers may insist that you add large banners on your website or some even want you to add a simple one small text link on to your site. Most of them do it on their own as soon as you’ve published your content. In this way, you never have full control over what your page really looks like. No matter what it is, an ad is a must for your free web hosting site and if you will not put the ad on to your website then your website account will be deactivated.

Another drawback is that it is very difficult to make money using free website hosting because most of them do not allow you to have Google Adsense. Adsense does play a part in most of the sites, but the site owner(s) is the only one whom it benefits. You can, however, make money through your free website hosting sites in other ways like affiliate marketing, but Google Adsense may not be an option.

The other biggest drawback of the free web hosting services is the low reliability of the server and a much smaller bandwidth. You will be allowed to get only 1or 2 GB bandwidth monthly and because it’s a free web hosting service, the work load on the server will be higher. An incredibly slow server means that it will take too much time for the users to open your website and they may become frustrated and leave before they even have access to your content. You will not have the facility of email account, PHP support, and auto responder and of data base in your free web hosting service.