It is always good to choose a hosting provider based on quality, support medium, reputation of the service. Nowadays, there are a lot of companies providing free hosting offers to attract the general audience or to get their company name to be famous. The below are some important points that why you shouldn’t go for free hosting at any case.
- Low disk storage:
Free website or web host companies usually host hundreds of websites in a single physical server and hard disks. So they usually give you very limited and less amount of storage to store your website data. When your website usually reaches that disk size limit, you may be asked to pay for more storage.
- Low amount or Limited bandwidth:
Bandwidth is nothing but the amount of data transferred from server to user browser.It’s very important factor to consider as most free websites come with very limited bandwidth caps. Your website willn’t be accessible when it has no bandwidth.
- Very slow website speed:
As we said, web host companies usually host hundreds of websites in a single physical server and hard disks. The resource will be normally shared for more websites as there is no guarantee or SLA for better performance in free plan. This will make your website load very low in speeds. You already know that slow websites create bad user experience and your company name may spoil.
- Unprofessional domain name or website address:
If you have a website address like yourcompnay.freehostingproviderdomain.com, then it will not look professional at all. It will create a bad impact among your website visitors and potential customers. Also, your customers would find it quite difficult to take your website seriously or fail to believe your business when you don’t even have a proper domain name.
- Free service is Not Really Free:
Many of these free hosting services will one day turn out to be limited trials. After a certain period of time, you will be asked to pay for it to continue. In most cases, this price is usually higher than normal hosting plans.
- Hidden Charges:
As like any other business or company, these free web hosting offers companies definitely need to make money to run their servers at least. Hence, there will be additional or hidden charges for services like email accounts, image hosting, website transfer, FTP access, etc.
- Beware of that your data can be lock down:
When you start with a free website or free hosting and then want to move to a paid service or to other service providers, it may be impossible to move your website data. Because these service providers do not offer any readymade tools to easily migrate your website to other services.
- Advertisement on your website:
For making money to run their servers, many of the free websites or hosting services are running advertisements on the websites hosted on their platform. You create content and build your website, but there would be nonsense ads on your website that will annoy the visitors.
- No Customer or Technical Support:
Usually there will be no customer or technical support for free plans with hosting services. Hence you will have to set up your site on your own and to resolve the issue that arises with your website.
- No backups
There is no concept of regular local or remote backups on these free hosting services. They may not backup your data for safety purposes.If there’s something bad happening to your website, there is no way for you to restore your data.
- No branded email or email service
As there is common domain or no email service, you cannot create email accounts with your own company brand domain name. This means you will have to use your yahoo, gmail or hotmail email account which does not look very professional.