The drawbacks of free hosting: serious reasons to pay for storing your site

Any business owner or webmaster would like to save money and optimise what they spend on their site. Many try to save on hosting. And that is a very serious mistake, one that can cost a great deal of money, cause reputational problems and lose you the site itself. We will go through all the drawbacks of free hosting and the advantages of paid hosting.

Why is paid hosting better? What it offers and its advantages

There are several reasons why a serious company is better off using only paid hosting services. Let us go through them in more detail:

• Maximum control over your own site. You will be able to configure the main parameters of how it works. Only you and nobody else decides which material and which advertising blocks appear on the site. Provided you pay on time, the safety of the site and of all the content on it is guaranteed.
• You can choose the amount of disk space and other resources allocated to you. Every plan a hosting provider offers includes a particular amount of resources. You will know exactly what you are getting and, if need be, will be able to increase the resources by switching to another plan. The hosting provider is responsible for the quality of the service.
• Technical support for customers. That matters a great deal to any business. Even the most advanced users and the most experienced web developers get into difficult situations; anyone may need help. You will be able to turn to Host4Biz support with any question about how your site works.
• Backups. Most hosting providers offer a site backup service. That makes it possible to restore all the information quickly after failures and other technical problems. Backups may be an additional service or included in the price of the plan.

Free hosting: the drawbacks and the risks it creates for a site

Let us look at why free hosting is best avoided, what its drawbacks are and which problems come with using it.

Very slow sites

How fast a site works depends on how much of the server's power is allocated to it. On free hosting that amount is minimal and the servers are heavily overloaded. The result is sad: sites work slowly, users are unhappy, SEO suffers and profits do not grow.

An unprofessional, unconvincing address for your site

A site's address tells users a great deal. Sites on free hosting get a free domain of the form vasyapupkin123.freedomen.com (freedomen here being the name of the service). Even a not very experienced user will guess that this is a free domain and is unlikely to trust a company with such a site or take it seriously.

Free hosting can be… paid

Such tricks happen too. On some services the terms are written very cunningly, and it turns out that only the trial period is free, after which you have to pay — and often more than you would with reputable hosts.

The second part of this unpleasant surprise is the additional services. They may be paid from the start. You can be charged for:

• storing images (and that is a considerable part of a site's data);
• FTP access;
• mail;
• moving the site, and much else.

As a rule the price of all these services is quite substantial and the hosting turns out not to be free at all.

Poor manageability and closed access to the site's data

Free hosting has no tools for moving a site. And if you decide to move from free hosting to paid, you will either have to build the site from scratch or pay web developers and content managers. Those costs can exceed the "saving" on free hosting.

Irritating third-party advertising on the site

Free hosting makes its money from advertising. Sites may show adverts with unrelated content that often covers the main material and spoils the impression the site makes.

Do you need any of that? The answer is obvious.

Your site can be shut down at any moment

Yes. Literally at any moment. That is written into most user agreements on services of this kind. The problem is that practically nobody reads user agreements, and if the site really is shut down there will simply be nowhere to turn for an explanation or for help. The risk outweighs every possible benefit of free hosting.

The free hosting provider itself may close down too. In that situation you will likewise be unable to complain to anyone or restore the site.

Uncontrolled sharing of personal information

Free hosting providers make money out of anything, including customers' personal information. You will agree that this is at the very least unpleasant and unsafe. At the very least you will end up on spam mailing lists. But more unpleasant consequences are possible too.

WordPress? Forget it!

Most free hosting simply does not allow WordPress to be installed. The reason is that the most popular CMS demands far more resources than free hosting is willing to give you. Even if you manage to install WordPress and launch the site, it will not work properly; constant errors and failures will make using the site practically impossible.

The risk of viruses and fraud

Often viruses are spread through free sites and all kinds of fraud are carried out. In some cases that happens because of the low level of security, and sometimes it is even done with the knowledge of the owners of the free hosting. There are dozens of fraudulent schemes involving free hosting, so it is better to keep your distance.

Limits: traffic, advertising, the number of pages

Free hosting servers have a traffic limit. That means that even if you have no problems with security and other technical matters, the site's growth and its SEO metrics will soon reach a ceiling which simply cannot be broken through on a free plan.

The next unpleasant surprise: you will not be able to earn from advertising banners and affiliate links. It is simply not in the interest of free hosting providers, so the option of inserting banners and advertising links is blocked.

You will not launch a blog on free hosting either. Simply because such a site means a lot of traffic and many pages, and therefore large server resources. You cannot get that for nothing.

Conclusions

You have seen that there are serious reasons not to use free hosting. A site kept on such a service practically does not belong to you. A great many reputational and financial risks arise.

So we recommend paid hosting. Host4Biz has an entry-level planthat even a small business can comfortably afford. Choose that option and you will be able to start successfully online and earn the profit you need for further growth.

We will give your sites reliable storage and steady operation. Read our blog and order hosting.