What is free web hosting?
Website hosting is vital in making your website accessible to other people, if it is not hosted, anyone other than you won’t be able to visit your website. This used to be very expensive to do, either having to pay for a server and maintenance yourself or paying someone you know to do it for you, both very costly methods of getting your site up. Nowadays, the majority of hosting is bought online through companies like BlueHost and eHost, who host your website on their own servers (and more) for a small monthly fee. It doesn’t always cost money, however…
Website hosting is vital in making your website accessible to other people, if it is not hosted, anyone other than you won’t be able to visit your website. This used to be very expensive to do, either having to pay for a server and maintenance yourself or paying someone you know to do it for you, both very costly methods of getting your site up. Nowadays, the majority of hosting is bought online through companies like BlueHost and eHost, who host your website on their own servers (and more) for a small monthly fee. It doesn’t always cost money, however…
Website hosting companies often offer a free website hosting package. They can offer this because what you upload to their servers then becomes an active advert for their website hosting company. How does it become this way? You cant expect a full hosting service for free, website hosts have to make money too! For their free hosting, they, in turn, put banner advertisements on your website, which massively intrude the content. This is, quite clearly, not very good for most people, especially those who want to show off what they have made to their friends, family and audience. It can ruin the website’s aesthetics, but for some this isn’t important, as they use the free hosting as a costless way to practice website development.
There are some other downfalls to free hosting as opposed to paid hosting, for example:
- The only way to publish the website is onto a subdomain of your chosen hosting company. Your website will, instead of appearing as ‘websitename.com’, present itself to visitors as ‘websitename.hostingcompany.com’, of which it’s affect is clearly negative. When using free hosting, you’ll never be able to publish to a unique domain of your choice, even if you already own it!
- The connection speed and uptime will be much worse. Because you are not paying anything for the service, website hosting companies group these free users on to as little servers as they can, which results in sharing computing power between many different users. This means slower and less frequented websites for everyone!
That is by no means a complete list of downsides, but to save the article from becoming overwhelmingly negative, I feel that I must discuss a big plus to not have to pay for hosting:
It is free, so the only cost is time.
That, for me, balances out all negatives, because it opens up website hosting, building and development to everyone.
