Up On Main Street

Thousands of people are searching for free web hosting every day.

There are many companies that do offer free hosting plans, but even though you may not be paying for it, the free web space will come as a cost.

Let me say there are certain times when you may want to use a free hosting provider.

• Keep in touch with family and friends for an up-and-coming special occasion
• Working on a school project

The above are not the only reasons why you may want to have a free host but if you building a website for profit or have a local small business and want to have a web presence, then you should not be using a free web host.

Why Not Use Free Hosting?

If you are looking to make money online with a web site, using a free hosting company does not look very professional. If you can’t take your business seriously, then I don’t believe your visitors will.

Many times when you have an account with a free hosting provider, you do not have your own domain name. Your URL may look something like this,

www.thebigfreesite.yoursite.com

You are actually a subdomain and that does not look very professional.

If you are using the free space because you have a local small business, using a sub-domain can be harmful to your business reputation.

Most business owners will use their small business name as their domain name to make it easier for people to find them on the Internet.

If you can’t afford to spend $5.00 a month to be seen online, then you need to review your budget for advertising as that is why many of the local small business are getting online. It is very cheap advertising. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars to be put into a telephone book that many people don’t use anymore.

Hosting Space

The hosting space since it is free is very limited. Because of limited space, you may not have room for all the web pages you plan on creating.

This could create problems for you in the long run.

You can actually purchase a hosting account with unlimited bandwidth and diskspace for under $5.00 a month at Hostgator.

As you can see the cost of web hosting is very affordable.

Many hosting companies even have a free domain name for life when you purchase your hosting through them.

Ads on Hosting

To generate money, most of the free hosting services will put ads on your site. You, unfortunately, will not reap any of the profit.

Once your site is online, you will not be able to put any ads on it, as most of the providers do not want you taking away from their profits.

So maybe free web hosting is just what you need, but before you start creating a website with a provider, make sure you answer this question honestly.

If my free hosted web site disappeared tomorrow, would it really matter?

You need to answer that question honestly, as I have known people that have devoted a lot of time and created large sites using free hosting space, only to find one day it was gone.

They not only lost income from it, but all the time spent designing and building the site just how they wanted.

They had to start over.