Free Web Page Hosting

Today, you can build free websites without much difficulty. It is reasonably easy to find many free web page hosting providers on the Internet to host your free web site. Before you carry on to find a free web page hosting, it is important that you be familiar with several key aspect of free web site hosting.

How are the free web page hosting providers survived?

Unfortunately, all free web page hosting services come with diverse conditions. By hosting with free web site hosting providers, your web visitors are subjected to various advertisements when access your free web site, either through pop ups, pop under or commercial banners directly on your website. Moreover, banner ads will be displayed to you (as a webmaster) on control panel or file manager during website management. Occasionally, you will also receive emails with ads from your free web page hosting provider. Furthermore, you may lose your privacy as your email address may be sold to third party for a profit.

Other free web hosting providers may disguise itself as providing free hosting with very attractive hosting resources, such as 1000 MB disk space, 10 MB bandwidth, 10 email accounts and free setup, that may sound unbelievable for free hosting. So, what's the catch? In fact, these free web hosting providers make money from your domain registration. When you sign up their free web hosting account, you will have to choose to transfer your existing domain or to register a new domain. You will be charged a one time transfer fee of $35 if you transfer your hosting domain to them. Otherwise, register a new domain through them will cost you $25 per year (compare with the normal price of $9.95 offered by other domain providers) !

Nothing is exactly free in this world, there is always a price you have to pay!

What are the restrictions on free web site hosting?

There are many restrictions on free web site hosting, including:

• Limited disk space. Typically ranging from 5 - 10 MB with exceptional free web pages hosting providers offering up to 30 - 50 MB, some even up to 1,000 MB.
  
  
• Limited bandwidth. Usually in the range of 3 - 5 GB per month and any free web sites exceed the allocated data transfer rate are in risk of being shut down.
  
  
• Strict limitation on installing and executing your CGI scripts. Majority of free web page hosting providers do not allow running your own CGI script. However, some offer simple pre-installed scripts such as form processor, clock, visitor counter, guest book and etc.
  
  
• Limited file types. Not all file types are supported by the free web hosting providers. In general, several upload file types that are commonly supported are HTML, flash, Java, RealAudio, MP3 and etc. Always check with your free web hosting provider to find the exact file types allowed.
  
  
• File size limit. In general, most free web page hosting providers also limit the file size that can be uploaded to the server. For example, Yahoo Geocities has the file size limit of 5 MB.

Where do you find free web page hosting providers?

In general, you can find free web hosting providers using a search engine easily. In view of the fact that many players within the free web page hosting industry collapsed including some high profile players, hence we only recommend the veterans in free web hosting industry. This including: Yahoo free web hosting Geocities, Lycos's Tripod and Angelfire.

What are the disadvantages of free web page hosting?

In fact, there are numerous drawbacks on free web site hosting. Here, there are few major weaknesses that we'd like to emphasize:

• Once, Xoom.com was a popular free web page hosting provider. All users created their free web site using Xoom were given a subdomain address: members.xoom.com/yourwebsite. Unfortunately, xoom folded like many free web page hosting services out there on the Internet. Without warning, nobody can access the free Xoom web site any longer, including your web visitors. If you have a business web site that you have spent a lot of time and money to market it online. Now all of a sudden, your valuable customers can no longer access your URL address: members.xoom.com/yourwebsite! This is one of the major disadvantages.
  
  If you plan to host your web site using free web page hosting, as a minimum, make sure to find a cheap domain name registration to register your own domain name. With you own domain name, you can then use a free URL forwarding service to change your free web page hosting service later on if needed.
  
  
• In general, free web hosting is extremely unreliable. First of all, if the free web hosting provides scripting features such as PHP or CGI, many spammers are likely to abuse these features with spam, adware, spyware and etc rendering the free web server response to be very slow and totally shut down in extreme cases.
  
  
• Don't expect to get good support or any support at all from free web page hosting providers.
  
  
• Unless you are hosting your personal web site, hosting your business web site on free web hosting server with advertisement displays popups on your web site only reveal lack of professional and commitments on your business. And a loss of credibility has very serious impact on sales especially for online business.

In view of numerous disadvantages and limitations, free web page hosting is only recommended for personal web site hosting, where you don't mind the advertisements, slow server response and various hosting restrictions. However, business web site is not advised to operate on free web hosting mainly for professionalism, credibility and reliability reasons.

If you are not even willing to invest a measly monthly cost of less than US$7 on commercial web hosting to host your business web site, your potential customers would certainly think twice before doing business with you. Create a professional website of your own could very well prove to be well worth it in the long run. To find best quality and affordable web hosting, you can read our top 5 cheap web hosting services here.

A beginner's guide to web hosting

Web hosting features explained

How to choose a right web hosting service?

How to select a web server and web server platform?

How to transfer your web site to a new web hosting service?

Should you choose free web page hosting?

How to create a website?

Multiple domain hosting - should you consider?

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