The Free Web Hosting concept
Free web hosting is a great concept for people who want to go ahead and set up their own website without any monetary cost. The idea is that you find a free web host, sign up for their free service and away you go. Usually they will offer free website creation tools. Often the tools offered to free web hosting accounts do not have many of the useful features that are offered to paid web hosting accounts. But there is of course a cost… even for the free services.
How do free web hosts make money?
The providers who offer free accounts make money in a number of ways. Most commonly, through getting you hooked on their free service, but then hoping you will want more of the frills… for which you will have to pay them a monthly fee. Perhaps you will want more disk space for your website, databases, add a shopping cart to sell products and or monetize your site through your own Google AdWords account.
Another way some host providers make money is to prominent add banners or advertisements that you can’t remove. These links are often distracting or downright irritating. However, if you are running a business website, it may be worse. These ads are likely to be targeted toward to your visitors based on the content of your website, and thus, they make poach potential customers from your website and take them directly to a competitor’s website. This is not good for business!
The cost of down time
Finally, some free host providers simply do not offer you reliability. The first free hosting account I signed up for was great, to begin with. Then I found my website was down several times a week. When I would contact them, they would reply telling me that I could sign up for the premium service (with a monthly fee!) that did not experience the same downtime that the free server did. At that time it was quite annoying to have to pull down that website and take move it to a more reliable free host provider.
Summary so far
If you don’t select the best free host service there may be several non-monetary costs to you or your business. First, you may have restrictive limitations placed on the size, type and functions included. Second, you may have annoying banners or advertisements distracting your visitors or even driving them to a competitor’s site. Third, the server downtime may prevent people from visiting your website.
