Too Free, Or Not Too Free?

That is the question.

In other words: Are free web hosts a viable option?

Free Web Hosts: They Could Cost You

The biggest problem with almost all free web hosting services is that they inject advertisements into your web site. You have no say whatsoever about what the ads are, where they are, or how many of them there are. They're often injected into your code and screw up the site. Advertisements annoy visitors, especially when they're pop-up ads or taking up half the page. This alone is enough to discount the idea of using a free web host.

If there's going to be advertisements on your web site you alone should be getting the revenue from them.

If you think about it, the free web hosting services can cost you more than the pay hosts. If your site hosted on a free hosting server is chock full of advertisements and scares visitors away, you're literally losing business. Those visitors could have been on your site making you some profit, but instead they got annoyed by the pop-up ads and left.

You Get What You Pay For With Free Web Hosts

Which is to say: Very Little. As if forced, unprofitable advertisements weren't enough, the charade ensues:

Good luck finding a free web host with a decent uptime. "Uptime" refers to the amount of time their servers are able to make your site available on the web. You should be looking for a web host with 99% uptime or better. Free web hosts might have quite a bit of trouble offering you this. This is important, however, because any time your web site is unavailable you are losing valuable traffic, aka money.

Free web hosts don't offer much in the way of extras, either. There's a plethora of things that a premium web hosting company offers that make the fees one hundred percent worth it.

Premium Web Hosts: The Hosts With The Most

Outstanding uptime, (our number one choice has 99.9% uptime...), not one single advertisement forced onto your web site, great technical support, (often 24/7), server compatability and support for web scripts such as PHP, and a ton of valuable resources included such as:

So...Too Free, Or Not Too Free?

Way too free. We do, however, provide links to some free web hosting services for you on our top ten web hosting services page, however we strongly recommend you spend a little bit of money on a premium web hosting service. (There's no free web hosting services in our top ten, they just couldn't compare to the premium hosts, no matter how free they are.)