Free Web Hosting

Is free web hosting worth it?

The answer to that question of course is "it depends". It depends on what you are planning on using the web site for. If you are going to try and create and ecommerce store, then free web hosting probably isn't for you. If on the other hand you are going to create a site with family pictures or other information, then free web hosting may be for you.

How can people offer free web hosting?

There are a lot of free web hosting providers out there. Most of them will put some sort of advertisement on your page with every load. Doing this the free web hosting provider is able to make money off of people clicking on the advertisements on your site. Seems a little bit backwards, you put up the content, you get the visitors to your site, the owner of the servers makes the money on people clicking on the advertisements on your page. The other way people use your site is they give you a subdomain of their main site. This way your address looks something like http://www.theirsite.com/yourusername. Doing this provides them with more pages at their website address. They are hoping you put godd content up and drive people to their domain.

What to look for in a free web hosting provider?

The biggest thing to look for in free webhosting is to make sure it is free. Just like everything else in the world, if the deals seems to good to be true, it probably is. The second thing to look for in free hosting is why it is free. Check to see what type of ads are going to be shown on the site. See if the ads are pop-unders, pop-ups, banner-ads, etc. After these two features then you check out the rest of the features based on your needs such as drive space, bandwith, mail features, etc.

Free Web Hosting Features

This is a list taken from our page on affordable web hosting. The affordable web hosting page goes into more detail on the features you should look for in a web hosting provider.

Storage/Webspace	This may be called a couple different things, but it refers to the amount of actual hard drive space you are allowed to use on their servers. This is important depending on what type of site you are going to create. If you are creating a website with pictures and video make sure you have enough space to store all of the files you are going to need. Try to figure out how much space you are going to need to have, then be sure to buy well above this mark, because there is always a need for a little more space.
Bandwidth	Bandwidth refers to the amount which can downloaded from your site in a specified period of time. For instance a provider may allow for 100 GB of bandwidth per month. This means your site will be allowed to download 100 GB of information each month. If you have a video on your site which is 1MB in size, this one video would have to be downloaded 100,000 times to reach this limit, or if you have one 100 KB page on your site it would be downloaded 1,000,000 times to reach this threshold. Of course sites consist of more than just one page or one item so the bandwidth is taken up by anything which is downloaded from your site.
E-MAIL	Email comes in a couple different varieties depending on the web hosting provider. One option is Webmail. Webmail means you can log into a place on the web and read your mail. POP3 access is the other main type of email. This means you get your email account from their servers in a program like Outlook.
Site Building	Almost all web hosting providers have a graphical interface for creating website which is usually done through the Control Panel. They may call this different things, but most have one in one form or another. The other option is to create the pages yourself, or have a web developer create them. If you create your site this way then the pages are uploaded to the web hosting provider through FTP access.

Free Web Hosting Recommendations

Of course no page would be complete without some recommendations on free web hosting providers. Below are actually not links to the free hosting website specifically, but to sites which keep a running list of good free web hosting providers. I am sure their web sites will be of use to you in your search. I have only listed here my favorite ones since there are too many to list in any small list.

http://www.free-webhosts.com/webhosting-01.php
http://www.100best-free-web-space.com/freeHosts.html

affordable web hosting cheap web hosting credit card merchant account ecommerce merchant account ecommerce shopping cart free merchant account free shopping cart merchant account provider online store builder payment gateway retail merchant account sell item online sell product online small business merchant account