Who don’t like free stuff? The fact there are no free lunch in this world. Every website that hosted on the server need reliable server. In offline industry, we know that the location is very important to determine our business/store, for business website web hosting server is one of the most important things. There are many many free hosting in this world, but how can they work? Are they really offer free hosting? How can they survive? In this article, we will talk about the free hosting services.
Free Hosting, is that TRUE?
If you have business, what is your goal? Profit, right? If we build business, we want to make profit. This is same like web hosting services outside there that provide free services. They also want to make profit. If they cant make any profit, how they pay their expense, server fee, maintenance fee, and the others fee? If you think that free hosting will saving your money, that’s totally WRONG!! It will hurts your business if you continue using their service. The major issues that you can face are reliability and security of your website. Just imagine if sometimes free hosting providers cant survive, they cant pay the fee anymore, what are they going to do? They will close their company and say ‘bye’ to you. All your files/works disappeared within 1 day. You build your business for a long time but destroy you within 1 day. Do you want this happened to you?
I want FREE Hosting, Are They Secure and Reliable?
Usually free hosting is offered by not so popular companies or hobbyists trying to build up a business. In most of the cases these servers are rented from big hosting companies but I met cases when someone had his servers at home. These servers probably are not built to support hundreds of accounts and thousands of connection, so the result will be slow website loading, outages, delays and a lot of other problems. If a website is hacked on the server, all other accounts can be compromised as well, so there is a big downfall in security as well. Another problem beside unreliability and security can be the guarantee issue. Some companies can vanish overnight and all your hard work and website is gone. If you don’t have a backup of your website, probably you will have to start again from scratch.
They will Advertise on Your Site
Another problems that you might encounter if you use free hosting is the unwanted ads on your website. As I said above, there are no free lunch in this world, you get free hosting from them, but they can also put their link on your site. Sometimes they also put banners on your site. You cant control this ads because you are not the administrator, they handle all your sites. Just imagine, customers that comes to your site and see the advertising banner, this will drive away visitors and your potential customers. Free hosting get money from the advertisement banner. Once again, there are no free lunch in this world!
Limitations in Free Hosting
If you use free hosting services, there are many limitations. They will limit everything, limit maximum size of your website, your bandwith, your CPU usage, your memory usage, and the others. If you against their TOS, they will terminate your account directly, they will shut down your site without any prior notice. As I said above, it will hurt your business.
Free Hosting, for Who?
If you are new in website and want to try to build your site online, then you can try free hosting. But if you are serious in online business, then I would never recommend you to use free hosting. If you want to be successful on online business, web server is one of the most important thing. With range $4-8/month, now you can get reliable hosting. If your business is success, then this is not huge money to spend $4-8/month.
Why Choose Paid Hosting?
Having a paid hosting account will make things easier, and you can spend your time for more productive things then managing and worry about your website. On a shared hosting account there are very few limitations and comes with lots of benefits, such as: domain name, professional email address, support for multimedia, support for blog and forum, and in most of the cases 24/7 customer support to help you with any hosting related issue.
If you want to build a professional ASP.NET website, then ASPHostPortal and HostForLIFEASP.NET can be good consideration for you. These two companies are offering reliable services at a very competitive price. You can also get a free domain name if and a lot of other features that are nonexistent in free hosting.