Free Web Hosting vs. Paid Web Hosting

By Albert
In Blogging
27/08/09 at 18:38
4 Comments

Free Web Hosting vs. Paid Web Hosting

The idea of free web hosting sure can be enticing at first, but like all things that are free, there is a catch to it. The consequences of hosting your main business or “serious” campaigns that revolves around launching your website on a free hosting provider, can have some deadly consequences if you are not careful. Be warned that most businesses that start on a free hosting provider are bound to fail already because free hosting providers just cannot keep up with your site’s resources although they may say “unlimited bandwidth” or “unlimited disk space.” Truth be told, there is no such thing as “unlimited” with a price of free.

The only purpose of free web hosting providers to me that I can think of, is that they can be used as “guinea pigs” whenever you are trying to test something out before wanting to test it out on your actual website. Other than that, if you are serious about creating your own website, we strongly recommend finding a reliable paid hosting that offers quality support and competitive pricing.

Why Not to Go With Free Web Hosting

Provides no backups (most of the time)
Sometimes no support
Limited disk space/bandwidth
Unreliable most of the time
Can be restricted to only certain rules
Can have forced ads
Data can be loss
Low tech
Site can be down the next day to never be returned
Most free web hosts come and go

At this point your question may be, well what if I don’t want to make a serious website or start a serious business? Then, continue playing around with those free hosting providers until your ready for the big guns. Just be sure to backup anything that is important in the process manually.

Until then, we will be talking about what shared hosting is, VPS, dedicated hosting, and etc because web hosting is about finding that right hosting provider that personally fits your website usage and budget. You may think going for the price that offers more disk space/bandwidth is the more controversial way to go, but fact is, you should only buy space/bandwidth that you know you are going to be using or else it would be a waste of money every month. Dedicated hosting can go from $100-$200/m, VPS $15-$70/m, and shared hosting can come from as little as $1-$15/m depending on where you buy web hosting from and from what plans. But forget that I ever said VPS hosting or dedicated hosting. You won’t be needing that type of extensive hosting unless your site becomes a big hit that consumes well over 150GB of bandwidth or disk space every month. Moola Days gets about 1,000 visitors daily and our bandwidth usage is only 15GB every month. You can already get a picture of how extremely popular your website has to be to even consider those two hosting options unless you are starting a space consuming oriented website like Youtube. Dedicated is of course better than VPS. VPS is probably considered next level hosting above shared hosting.

Standard Web Hosting

Now that we gave you a nice standard overview of what hosting options are commonly provided, you can already know that shared hosting, or should I say cloud hosting, is the plan most first time webmasters decide to go with simply because it is cheap, reliable, and maintenance free on your side. Why some people refer shared hosting as cloud hosting is simply because your website is hosted on a server that hosts multiple of other sites as well and not just yours. Shared hosting should be the first option you choose when first paying for your first paid web hosting. Remember, you can always advance up hosting options whenever you need to and most of the time, if you pay an extra buck or two every month, you can usually purchase more disk space of bandwidth if it is needed. Most of the time if you consult with your hosting provider and buy web hosting for a longer period of time, they will also give you a reasonable discount as well.

Some 5 Ideal Web Hosts That I Recommend To New Comers can be found here and of course, the web host that hosts Moola Days single handedly with competitive pricing, is Fivebean. Any of these sources are great reliable web hosts that I truly recommend. Although launching a website may take a small investment, you have to start somewhere right?