If you are planning on having a website, a web hosting and domain registration service is inevitable for your requirement. You will need to make use of these services. But the options available out there are immense. You can choose from web hosting that is completely free to use to the web hosting that might cost up to thousands of dollars. Naturally, when there is something free available, we tend to go for that, but the thing that you must consider is that there will be some catch when they are ready to give away something as important as web hosting for free. So what’s the catch actually?
When we encounter the word ‘free’ on the Internet, most of the times it means that there are advertisements you will have to put up with. Well, this is one of the things that you will need to contend with when you are using free web hosting. These advertisements can be in various forms. Most of the time, they will be banner ads. Mostly, you will have no control on the manner in which these banner ads appear. Some of the free web hosting services will insist that you keep the banner ads right on top of the webpage. You might think this is something that’s really all right, but when your website begins getting an identity of its own, you are not going to like it.
Worse than the banner ads are the popup ads. This can be seriously detrimental to the prospects of your website because no one likes things popping up when they are browsing. This is one thing free web hosting services might make compulsory for you to use, much to your chagrin.
Most of the free web hosting providers will repeatedly remind you that if you do not want the banner ads or the popup ads to be part of your website, you must buy their paid services. So, the free web hosting is actually a ploy to make you a subscriber for their paid service.
There are other restrictions that you might have to contend with. In most cases, the free web hosting providers will control the matter you post on your website. They will be against certain kinds of matter for their own reasons. This might hamper your website’s prospects when it is planning to expand, because initially you will accede to their requests. They may also prohibit you from posting certain multimedia content on your website, such as videos. In the world of Web 2.0, not using videos could be quite detrimental to most websites.
Another big problem is that they might want you to use a website name tagged with their own name. Your website name might have to appear like http://www.thehostname.com/yourwebsitename. Naturally this is something you won’t want. But if you want your name to appear as http://www.yourwebsitename.com, you will need to turn over to a paid option with them.
For every limitation that the free web hosting service has, there will be an alternative paid option for you to choose. You must remember that though a free web hosting plan may look appealing to you in the initial stages, you cannot stay with it forever. The best thing is to go for a paid service right from the start so that you create a favorable impression on your clients the moment your website is launched.