The Problem with Free Web Hosting Plans
In my opinion, free web hosting is one of the most misunderstood concepts on the web today. Free web hosting plans are becoming increasingly popular as new webmasters bite into the idea without actually analyzing the consequences. I myself spent many years, at the start of my webmaster career, using free web hosting plans. This experience has giving me an insight into the down-side of free web hosting plans that many people seem to miss.
Would Coke promote Pepsi on their website?
Although the rhetorical question above seems ludicrous, this concept is one of the
fundamental problems with free web hosting plans. Forced advertising is the way that
hosting companies can afford to provide "free" hosting. Whether it be through
pop-ups, pop-unders, headline ads, or implanted adsense you will be hosting
advertisements on your website that generate revenue for your hosting company whether
you like it or not. Not only is this annoying it can also ruin the look of your page;
the majority of the time you cannot control what the ads look like or where they go,
they are simply dropped down onto your site and there is nothing you can do.
Traffic Jams
The bottom line in web hosting is that bandwidth (data transfer) costs money and if
your plan is free it is most likely your bandwidth will be limited. Too many times I
have attempted to access a web site hosted on a free server and been given the message:
"This user has acceded their bandwidth limits, please try again next month". As a
webmaster this can be infuriating. Imagine building a solid page, marketing it,
gaining an audience, and then losing that audience because your page is not allowed
anymore hits for the month.
SEO woes
This is a problem that caused me a ton of frustration, but in the end taught mea lot
about how search engines work and how search engines handle name resolution. In almost
every case free web hosting plans do not allow you to point a domain name
(www.yoursite.com) to an actual page. Instead you are forced to use a concept called
URL redirection. URL redirection allows a webmaster to identify a site that the URL
should point to. So if a user types in www.example.com and we have configured it to
redirect to www.freehost/users/mysite.html it will end up on that page. This does not
seem like much of an issue until you begin trying to get your website indexed in the
search engines. So you submit your site (www.example.com) to some directories and you
ake some good link partners and then you start to wonder, why am I not being listed in
the SE's? I have 100 solid back links pointing to www.example.com, what is happening.
The problem is that www.example.com has no data, it has no content, it simply redirects
to your actual page at www.freehost/users/mysite.html. SE's not only will not index a
page with no data or content but they may even view this as an attempt to fool their
algorithm, thus banning your domain name. The only work around is to forget the domain
name and optimize for your free hosting address, which is not really an acceptable work
around.
But wait!
Although I am a strong believer that free web hosting is not the way to go it is
possible to find a free web host that works for you. There are some out there that do
not force advertising, do not limit your bandwidth, and will allow pointed domains.
The problem is finding one that does all three. If you are a serious, or even only
slightly serious, webmaster take the hit and pay the money for web hosting. In the end
you can get an awesome web hosting plan for as low as $5.95 a month, and trust me this
will be WELL worth the money.
Be sure to check out Cheap Web Hosting Plans at my website.
Chris Hunt
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