What is Free Web Site? - the Free Web Site Background

What is Free Web Site?

A free web site is not a real web site. It is created by free web site maker, who is just an ordinary web site owner, allocating his web site¡¦s sub-directories, sub-domains or just web pages for other individuals to use them as the free web sites. The site owner functions like a free web site host but in actual fact, he is the actual owner. In other words, if you register and develop using free web site, you are using some web space provided by the web site owner (the host). Your web site will not has its own IP Address. Search engines will only consider your site as web pages belong to the domain which holds the IP Address.

A free web site is not really free. It needs disk space, data transfer space (traffic/bandwidth) and other necessary support facilities. The free web site host has to pay for these costs. He would subscribe a hosting plan with big capacity to achieve economics of scale. Thanks to the competition, nowadays some cheap web hosting packages come with pretty big capacity which makes free web site hosting possible to anybody.

What is the incentive for free web site making?
Free web site is part of the business model of some online businessmen. It is used to achieve some business objectives, which eventually should generate profits to them. There are various ways they can generate profits, such as

• Putting advertisements in the free web sites they host.
  
• Collecting email addresses and send advertisements to these addresses. Some even sell these addresses to spammers.
  
• Some free web site hosts are host resellers. When your free site becomes popular, gets more traffic (more traffic also means higher cost to the host), they will ask you to subscribe hosting plan with them or to pay for the traffics. Then, you have to choose between losing your site and paying them.
  

1. If losing the site does not cost you a big deal.
   
2. If the site¡¦s popularity is not so important to you.
   

1. You do not own the site and you have no rights. You are in the mercy of the site owner. He can remove the free web site anytime he deem fit.
   
2. Your free site will likely carry advertisements for the site owner, depending on his terms and conditions.
   
3. The site owner will post restrictions to you. You may not have the choice of the theme you like, the affiliate programs you want to promote. You may not be able to create as many pages as you want. You may not be able to upload your images, scripts etc.
   
4. You may not have access to the source code where you can specify keywords and to optimize your site. These are the key factors to promote your position in search engines.
   
5. Since it is free, you will not be given much disk space or traffic capacity. Traffic capacity is especially important. If your traffic reaches that capacity limit, your site will have to bring down or you have to pay for it. Most free site hosts don¡¦t even reveal how much space or traffic you allow using.
   
6. You cannot choose the domain name to place the main keyword. Keyword in the domain name is highly regarded by the search engines.
   
7. You may not have access to your site¡¦s traffic statistics to analyze your visitors such as how they get into your site, which page is visited the most etc.
   
8. What happen if the free web site host fails to make enough profit? He would probably close down the web site. All the free web sites he hosts will be gone all together. He has no obligation to warn you beforehand when this is going to happen.