Many people are wondering paid web hosting even exists when there is a free one.
Who would buy it, if you just can get a free one with a few clicks of your mouse? The answer of this question has much in common with the saying there is now free lunch. If we have to put this in other words, paying for a certain service guarantees you that you get high quality. This is exactly why you can expect some problems when using free web hosting for your website.
Also Read: How to Choose the Best Web Hosting?
Here is a list with the main disadvantages of free web hosting:
Speed:
If you want your website to have a better speed, then you must pay for it. When your hosting provider has a lot of customers, they share the resources of the server – they share computational time, disk space and speed of data delivery that has once been calculated.
The more customers a hosting provider has, the fewer resources remain for each one of them. Of course, a bigger part of the resources is intended for the customers why pay for the web hosting, which makes things worse for the ones who have chosen the free service.
Support, reliability and access speed:
This is something extremely important. A website that constantly has some problems and does not work properly repel many of your customers and users. Once someone finds your website through a certain search engine and tries to enter it, but sees that the website is not working properly, they will proceed to the next one. In addition, slow access speed can be pretty annoying for users.
If a certain problem occurs with the service, the aid that you can expect from the company that provides the free hosting service tends to zero. Of course, that is not always true, but you must be prepared for such situations.
Unfortunately, free web hosting does not guarantee any uptime (the time during which your website will be accessible to the world). How would you feel if one day your website just disappear? You can not take the backup of your data, the website is simply not there, and the maintenance is not responding – this may happen any time if you have chosen free web hosting service. And the worst part is that you can’t know when your website may disappear due to malfunction of the hosting.
Advertising:
Most free web hosting providers make the advertising in your website mandatory. Of course, this is done in order help them cover their costs for free hard disk space and the other services they provide you with. That is the reason why some free web hosting providers require you to place banner ads on the pages of your website.
Others put some pop-up ads that appear each time you load a page, and third require you to put a framed ad on a certain place of your website pages. So, whichever method you use, make sure that you agree with it.
The amount of free space:
Do you have enough free space for your needs? If you want to expand your website later, then it is better to take care of such a future expansion. Most websites use less than 5MB of Internet space. Remember that your needs will vary depending on how many photos and other media you are planning to upload on the web pages.
Limit of file types and their size:
You need to be careful when choosing your free web hosting service, because some hosting providers have a maximum size of files that you are upload. On the other hand, there are others, who put some limitations on the file types that you can upload. So, if you need to upload a specific type of file on your website, you will probably have to look for another hosting provider.
