With the prices of all the consumer goods hiking up there are very few things left in life that comes for free. With the inflated prices of all products and services and money pinching every moment free products have become a true lifesaver helping a great deal in cost cutting. And when you can web host and buy some free marketing for yourself you can never let go of such an opportunity.
Downsides Of Free Web Hosting Services
Now the million dollar question is whether they are worth it? Whether there are any downsides of free web hosting services? With all small and big business houses and institutions wanting to own some cyber space of their own the web hosting providers are gaining lots of business. Free hosting services apparently is way more lucrative because it hosts all you data for visitors to see without charging you any peanuts. For all those new entrepreneurs and individual who are on a tight budget these free web hosting services are a essential cost saver but they also comes along with a pretty great deal of downslides.
1. No Domain Names: When you go for free webhosting services it is quite predictable that they won’t include any domain name as you will be given a sub domain of the hosting company.
2. Limitation of File Size: You can get a web page to hosting data anything between 5MB to 100MB. Sfince the web hosting services are coming for free a considerably low bandwidth ill be given to you that would be sufficient to link to files.
3. Restricts Some Files: It will exhaust other important files like ZIP files and MPEG files.
Some hosting company will also provide you extra features like guest books, counters, virtual domain name, tracking logs, blogs etc. you won’t only be given a sub domain but also you won’t be provided with any advanced features.
4. Advertisements: Free hosting services gets more offensive when it compensates the cost of the free space it provides you with random advertisements that flashes and pops up ads on your page.
You have no option but to accept these offensive pop up adverts flashing on your page that will definitely distract and create a lots of inconvenience for all the visitors in need of serious information. Here reliability of such links also becomes a matter for concern as since the company would be providing you free services will not generally have any interest to serve the user needs. The support system is generally unresponsive as majority of them won’t provide a 24*7 support.
If you want a free web hosting service don’t pile on your expectation looking for any advanced features. You can’t ask or desire for any database management services and common packages like MySQL in the case of free web hosting services. You will only own an email account. These services don’t include DHMTL or flash programming or PHP. It will offer you very limited space with the server than other cheap hosting services.
5. Affects Clients: It is very important to maintain a good relationship with your clients. With the distracting investable ads that will not compliment the look and feel of your website can be a potential destruction weapon. It might kill your brand’s goodwill by disappointing visitors who are potential clients.
So it is wise if you skip using free web hosting services and seek to acquire real meaningful web hosting services. There are web hosting services for every budget. A cheap web hosting service is also a lot better than the free one. Because all good things doesn’t comes for free. If you know any other downsides of free web hosting services, kindly let us know in the comments below.
May be there are exceptions. I have used it for one of my site and it has no such disadvantages listed above 🙂 . Instead one problem that will be faced is that is goes down from time to time. This affects the visitors as sometimes the downtime is very long.