Free web hosting, is it worth it?

If you are on a tight budget you may or may have considered free web hosting. However before you go ahead and find a free web host, you may want to read this article.

I have had first hand experience of free web hosting. When i first got interested in web design, i was a teenager i played about and used a few free web hosting.  I quickly realised what they were like,  and started paying for hosting.

Free web hosts typically don’t offer your any perks or extras, for example, you will be lucky to get PHP supported, having access to run databases is usually out of the question. Also many free hosts, in order to help cover their costs normally stick adverts on all your pages. From my experience these popup adverts can contain spyware and adverts. Any visitor using your site risks getting infected with spyware … just what you want if you are selling a service or want people to return to your website!

FREE Hosting – Bad For SEO

If you use a free web host, getting a good search engine ranking is out of the question. As mentioned, with most hosts sticking popup adverts on your pages, this is a sure way to piss off google. Also, on a free web host you will need to consider what other users on your server are doing.

Free web hosting will be perfect for scammers and hackers who want to stay untraceable  by not having to give the host any of their private contact details and credit card numbers etc. So if someone else on your server, sharing the same IP as you runs a scam website and google noticed this – your site will probably be affected.

The Server

What kind of server can you expect your website to run on with a free web hosting. You can hardly expect it to be a fast modern box. Why should the free web host invest in expensive hardware? There is nothing in it for them. So you can expect a slow unreliable service. Also, free hosts since they are not making money from you will often highly overload the server, with this will also lead do a very poor uptime.

So How Does A Free Web Host Make Money?

To keep a server online, it would cost you upwards of £80 a month in running costs – this is depending on your setup. So how does the free web host manage to cover their costs?

As discussed earlier, you would expect to get bombard with adverts. So the free web host will make some money by selling advertising space. However free web hosting is usually used by most hosts to tempt you into a paid plan. Once you are with the company and using their free service, after you notice how bad free web hosting is you might be tempted to upgrade to a cheap paid plan – staying with the same host is often easier, rather than having to move all your data over to a new web hosting company.

Summary

As mentioned before in our blog, with web hosting you get what you pay for. We would not recommend free web hosting to anyone – however my opinion may be a bit biased as i am one of the managers at AGL Host. But why go for a free web host? Paid web hosting is far far superior, if you search about on the internet you can get a reasonable standard of paid web hosting for peanuts. Our paid hosting starts from under £2 a month, less than a pint of beer, for a great reliable service.

Free web hosting, is it worth it?  No

Have you used a free web host in the past? what are your experiences? Let us know.

Regards, Chris

  Category: web hosting