Free Web Hosting or Paid Web Hosting

When trying to decide if Free Web Hosting is right for you, or if you should go ahead and opt for a Paid Web Hosting service, there are a great many things to take into consideration. Not even considering the cost, allow me to look at a few other factors that should assist you in making an wise decision.

If you are going to make a decision that's in the best interest of your business, you first need to consider what purpose your website will serve. Are you merely looking for something that will allow you to share photos of family and friends with a distinct group of people? Or, on the other hand, are you thinking of something a bit more complex than that? Like creating many different pages with various content? Perhaps you are looking to promote a specific product or business?

Why you want a website is a strong indicator of what type of web hosting you should use. Before you can make an informed decision, you first should look into the pros and cons of both free web hosting and paid web hosting.

Free Web Hosting Pros

Free web hosting services are wonderful if you do not have a lot of experience in building web pages. Most of these sites, such as Blogger and Wordpress, often have extremely user-friendly control panels that make building your web pages extremely simple. If you are building a personal website, such as a simple family connections type of site, using a free web hosting company would be an ideal choice.

Free Web Hosting Cons

Most, if not all, of the free web hosting sites will place advertisements on your website. In addition, you will also have very little control over the look and feel of your site. Most of these free web hosting sites come equipped with ready to use templates, so this will limit your ability to feed your creative juices.

You will also have limits on how many files you can upload, due to bandwidth limitations, however this should only be an issue if you are planning to build an extremely large site.

Paid Web Hosting Pros

When you pay for a web hosting plan, your options are almost limitless. Most paid web hosting plans include unlimited bandwidth and disk space, a free domain name, and free sub-domains. Some other common features are CGI-Bin, MySQL databases, and Microsoft FrontPage extensions.

You will also discover that paid web hosting services are often much more reliable than those offered by free web hosting companies. Most of the paid hosts have "uptime reliability" of more than 95 percent of the time.

Paid Web Hosting Cons

The only con to a paid web hosting service is the fact that you have to pay. Some will offer you a discount on the monthly rate if you purchase a year at a time as opposed to paying the monthly fee. Even in paying the monthly hosting fee, on average you can expect to only spend between $5 and $12 per month.

Considering the difference in the control you will have over the appearance of your site, not to mention the limitless bandwidth and disk space, those rates are very small. Not to mention the customer support that is offered through most hosting companies is much better and more professional than those of the free variety.

What it comes down to is, basically, knowing what the goal of your website is. If you simply want to get a site up, regardless of the way it looks, then the free web hosting service is what you should go for. Contrarily, if you want to design and develop a web site that you can be proud of, you will have no problem shelling out the small monthly fee to a paid web hosting company.