To Pay Or Not To Pay That Is The Question About Web Hosting
There are advantages and disadvantages with everything in life. The same could be said for free or paid web hosting. The advantage of free hosting is of course that it is free. This sort of hosting such as GeoCities is great for personal and family sites.
Free web hosting sounds attractive. How does a free web hosting provider get any money? They are a business so they are there to make money. They do this by advertising. You see you get a free site. You then drive traffic to the site. This traffic now become potential customers of your web hosting provider. So your web host has given you a free site in return for free traffic.
If you want to run an internet business from your site, these ads can conflict with your product or service. Your free service may now become a hindrance.
If you are promoting a product it is important to come across as a professional and not as a rank amateur. A free site will make your product look cheap. Then there is the problem of focusing on your product. You will need to get your message across to your potential customer. You don’t need them to become distracted by the ads that are on your site. In the end your “free site” may in fact be costing you money in sales, but attracting sales for your free web hosting provider.
If you are promoting a product you will always be better off with a paid site. You will need to choose the hosting package that will suit your needs. Some of the benefits of a paid site are:
1. Can create your own email accounts. This means that emails can look like this: yourname@yoursite.com. This is much better than yourname@yahoo.com or some other free email service. This will give you a more professional look.
2. You will be able to use PHP and CGI scripts
3. You will have access to MySql databases. Most scripts today require a database. You may wish to use a blog script such as Wordpress. With a paid web hosting account you will be able to.
4. You will have a much larger amount of disk space available to you.
5. You will have access to a powerful and easy to use control panel which will allow you to do things behind the scenes such as set up emails, databases and many other things.
These were just a few of the reasons why you need to choose a paid web hosting provider there are many more.
You don’t need to choose the largest package. You can start out small and grow your account as your business grows. Your web host should be able to painlessly increase your limits.
In summary: a free web site host is good for non commercial sites such as family or personal sites. If you want to sell anything on line you will be far better of paying for your web hosting provider.
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