Why You Should Not Use Free Web Hosting

If you want to start online business or want to take your local business online, you need a web site. Just making web site won't take you online. You need one reliable and good web hosting company to host your web site on the Internet. Many web masters and entrepreneurs make mistake at the beginning. They think of hosting their web site at free web hosting company. There are many problems attached with free web hosting. In this article, I am going to discuss some of them.

Advertising

The most common problem with free hosting is ads. Free hosting providers are not taking money from you but they need money to maintain their hosting service. So they will give ads on your web site and they will make money from your site. If these ads are content ads from Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network than we can understand that those ads are related to your content and it will add some value to your contents. However, in many cases these ads are not related to your contents. So your site will not make your visitors happy. You don't have any control over the ads given by your hosting company. You are forced to show their ads on your web site at the time of sign up service agreement. So there is nothing you can do about these ads.

URL and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Issue

Another big issue with free web hosting is with URL. They don't allow you to host your own domain to their hosting company. So you will have to use their sub domain to name your web site. Now you definitely don't want to name your web site using their sub domains. There is solution for this issue.

Use Redirect URL

Using redirect URL feature allows you to redirect users from your domains to the hosted sub domains. This makes sense from user point of view but redirecting creates another problem. When you redirect user from your site to another site, you are just forwarding all requests to another site. So in reality, your site doesn't have any data. When search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN live requests for your site, you will forward them also to another site. So search engines will think that your site doesn't have any data and they will not index your site. So there is no chance that you will get organic traffic from search engines.

Limited Control & Limited Band Width

Free hosting service providers don't give full control to you. So you cannot implement some advance operations like databases and .htaccess file. You are just given an ftp account to upload your files. No other access!

There is also a limitation on the bandwidth you use. So when you run out of your limit, your site access will be blocked. When any visitor visits your site, they will get message something like "This user has exceeded the data transfer limit. Please visit back again after a month". So nobody will get an access of your site until the end of that month.

Account Cancellation

All above problems are still fine but what if they cancel your free hosting account? Yes! It may happen. Your months of efforts to promote your site will be wasted. So there won't be any online business for you. If you are really serious about online business then don't go for free hosting service. There are many cheap and reliable hosting services available. You can use any one of them.