Why Better Not to Use Free Hosting Service!
Since the dawn of web hosting there have been free hosting providers offering hosting service in some way shape or form. It was the best way to get up and ready to go in a matter of minutes, but at what cost? We all know there is nothing for free in this world and someone’s gotta pay for “free”. You will never get away from free, but you can always take advantage of it in the short run. Free is not for everyone, but if you have something simple like a blog, personal, family, low trafficked website the hosting service is not a bad option to start with, especially if you’re broke. If there is ever a reason to move off of free web hosting, there are more reasons to start paying than there are words in the dictionary.
Don’t get me wrong, a free hosting service offers an invaluable benefit to the hosting world and really leads to the understanding and education of how the internet works and the ability to teach an old dog new tricks. In time, these free hosting providers have actually lowered their costs as hardware and software have all gone down in price, they are able to offer a hosting service with great amounts of disk space, bandwidth and some support service at zero cost to the en-user like yourself, however, there is a limit to what you can be offered and that is when you need to move to something more tangible and something that provides real services. A free web host can only offer so much, but if so much is enough and if everything is hunky dory, why change?
Believing you need to stay with free hosting is up to you, but remember not to be stubborn about it. If you are receiving web site problems after website problems, maybe it is time to move on, you have to understand that you are on shared space and your site is on a hosting service machine with thousands of other users. If one of those users decides to take up all the bandwidth or system resources, down goes your site and whom do you have to blame? No one but yourself. Again, staying because you are cheap is not the best excuse to use, but if your site is just a site with no other importance but to say “hello” to anyone that visits, more power to you.
Hosting Service - When to get out of Dodge?
If your website(s) are experiencing issues and you can’t get your email or your site is down more than it is up, maybe it is time to move to another hosting service. Not to say that this won’t happen with a paid host, but in a paid host you are still in a shared environment, but the quality is better such as the hardware used and the software used, plus you actually have clout when you want to call in to complain and you actually get to speak to a real live person. Well, the whole live person thing is up in the air depending on what web host you go to, but most nowadays offer some sort of telephone services with chat and email, so at least there is a body to get a hold of when you need an issue resolved. This of course only applies to those websites that you use regularly, such as ecommerce related, heavily trafficked site and or other type of sites that really need to be up and working.
Many free web hosts don’t offer email with their hosting service and those that do severely limit what you can do and you don’t have near the capacity or availability as you do with regular paid hosting accounts. In such events, you are definitely better of with paid hosting and paid hosting service in today’s market is cheaper than most anything like a specialty coffee or a pack of cigarettes per month. It’s not that much of a leap to go paid as the old days where you REALLY had to fork out the big bucks just for a domain name let along hosting and the number of other services that are included with packages these days.
To put everything into perspective; your website needs to be static and unchanging to warrant staying with a free host. Sure, many sites are that way and nothing needs to change. They were put up once and never been touched since. I’ve even got a number of those types of sites myself, but the ones that need to change daily, weekly, monthly are those that should or eventually will need to move to a paid environment, a professional hosting service. The idea is to choose something affordable and something that works for you. Ultimately, you get what you pay for. The main difference is that in a paid host your get more flexibility in what you need for your website like more resources and other perks that are definitely a bonus for moving, however, if what you are lacking is support, your priority should be support and NOT price, but you need to establish what you need before you jump ship because not every paid host is the same and some have strengths where others have weaknesses and it is always good to read the reviews to get an idea at what are those and if they correspond with your needs.
