Using Free Hosting Services

[SysOp]

Free web hosting is the most basic web hosting service that you can obtain and there are many free hosting companies that are available on the internet. Free hosting services are usually financed by advertisements on web sites that are hosted.


Free web hosting services are extremely limited. If you get a free hosting service you will have ads on the top and the bottom of your web-site and depending on what your web-site is all about, it may not fit at all but for people starting out on the internet it may be the best option if you don’t have a lot of traffic or just a small site.


The type of web domain that you receive when you get a free web hosting is a subdomain with the name that you pick (yourname.webhost.com) or a name in a directory (yourname.webhost.com). For example, if the name of your free host is freestanding.com,


Then your web domain would be yourbusiness.freestanding.com.


As stated before, if you are a novice, this is the type of account that you would probably want to get but there are some shortcomings to free web hosting if you are looking for more options on the account.


First, many free hosting accounts do not support database management or what you would call in simple terms, putting data structures on the free web host side of their server. Databases are usually used for online data retrieval routines. Many of these free web hosting sites do not support a common package called mySQL which allows you to program queries into your web sites.


They also don’t support multiple e-mail accounts. Most free web hosting service only gives you one email account and it’s usually a web based internet account. The host does not include modules for Flash Programming, PHP and Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHMTL).


In summary, free web hosting is for novices who want an easy hosting option without many bells and whistles.

 

[Spinat]

Free hosting is good for hobby projects or minor websites which you are not going to try to make a living out from.


Hostgator is very cheap with their hosting and I would think it fits anyones needs for cheap hosting if they want to be serious with what they are doing.

 

[Moh1]

Yeah as already mentioned, then free hosting is good as a test platform for some project you might have, but not for business websites,

 

[gwenpinay]

You can use free hosting services to support your business websites. If you're doing a test project on a free host, you can put backlinks to your site. Most free hosts have built-in tools that submit sites to directories and such so they get better traffic. You can take advantage of this to boost your business's stats.

 

[Postman]

If you are just starting out then free hosting is the one that you should turn into but the moment that you decide to make money from your website then that is the time that you need to buy your own hosting. Free hosting sucks big time for business because they can shut down your business anytime they want too.

 

[gwenpinay]

You don't have to have a business to want to buy a hosting service. However, it wouldn't make much sense to if you're not making money of of your websites. The site should "pay for itself" to make it worth it.