Large Hosting Providers Give Free Web Hosting a Makeover

Not to many years ago free hosting was thought of as the poor mans way of putting a web site up on the Internet. For many the search for a quality web host was an ongoing weekly trek through hundreds of fly by night "hosts" who aspired to make themselves rich by providing hosting to the masses at no apparent cost. However, the problem came about for many of these would be free web hosting providers as they were unable to turn a profit and quickly folded under the financial pressures that come with dedicated servers.

Many other free web hosts folded due to legal matters after allowing their customers to host web sites that contained illegal material of one type or another. The free web hosts were a popular haunt of the scam artists who would put up sites that looked almost identical to popular sites such as PayPal with only one intention: Stealing your Information.

These days though things are beginning to change. Large hosting providers have begun to look at free hosting services as a way to drive additional future revenue. GoDaddy for example provides all their domain name purchasers with a free hosting account with other add on products when they purchase a domain name.

Most of this change has been brought about by the shift in the web hosting business itself from a view of hosting as a premium product to one viewed as a commodity. This shift was precipitated by the large packages that began showing up a few years ago at insanely low prices. As the price of hosting packages slowly dropped and storage and bandwidth increased the profit margins began to shrink to all time lows.

It was for this reason that many hosts who at one time simply provided their customers with quality web hosting only began to offer secondary products such as domain names, marketing tools and many other services that benefited the customer, but became the main profit drivers for many companies.

The benefit for those that enjoy or need free web hosting is the quality of service that is now being provided. No longer do you have to worry if your host will be around when you wake up tomorrow. Of course you still need to be wary of many free hosts, but with large providers such as GoDaddy and Doteasy providing quality free hosting the quality has gotten better. For many this means they can now learn how to properly setup a web site without the additional costs of hosting.

Free hosting has taken a step to a new level and it is about time.