Stay Clear of Free Web Hosts

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As in everything in life, you usually get what you pay for, and more often than not it's usually less then what you pay for! And sadly hosting is not the exception. The internet has grown in so many leaps and bounds, everyone is trying to climb on to the bandwagon. Be it free hosting or paid hosting, you need to do your research, and who better to ask then us? We've conducted hundreds of experiments with all the top hosts, and most of the free servers. We've come to this conclusion, free web hosting is a complete waste of your time. If you plan for your website to be more than a personal blog, rather spend the little bit of extra cash and save yourself countless hours of frustration.

Support
Especially if you are new to the web, you need all the help you can get, if your hosting which is the root of your entire online presence is causing you hassles, they need to be sorted out promptly. The cold hard truth about free web hosting, there is no support, if we had been real clients, our websites would have been left stranded for days without simple problems getting resolved. Not only will people not be able to access your website, if it is constantly down, Google takes note and will adjust your rankings accordingly. Need I say more?

Crowed Servers
This is one of the biggest drawbacks to hosting on a free server. Because there's no cost involved every Tom, Dick and Harry that wishes to place get a website up is going to go with them. Servers don't come cheap if you take maintenance and bandwidth into account, and for this reason the free hosting operators cram as many accounts on to one as possible. Your website not only becomes the needle in the haystack on the internet it becomes that on the server itself!

Few Features
Forget about running a full blown WordPress site on your free hosting account. These servers offer the bare necessities, which is basically the ability to run simple static websites. There's no email, no databases, and you can forget about streaming video and audio. If they do offer this, the quality or your media is more than likely to be very poor.

Advertising
The biggest bane of free hosting. If you don't really care what your website looks like, this isn't a real problem. But for the majority of you out there, I'm sure you do. Free servers, in order to turn a profit, they will cram as much advertising as possible onto your website. Please note, you could be pleased with the results you get in the beginning, but these free hosts usually reserve the right to place what ever they want on your website. Due to the market, these adverts are sometimes less then savoury. I've had a client who was very pleased with the outcome of his website on a free host, to be completely horrified a few months later because it had been bombarded with more ads, making it virtually impossible to see the content underneath!

I know this article may seem pretty one sided, and it might be from the trauma I've had to deal with clients wishing to host on free servers. But none the less, the reason why free hosting isn't the best route is that they have to make that money back, where you would normally be paying them to host your website. Google doesn't push much traffic to free hosts, as they usually offer very little quality, and this is the dilemma, how do these free hosts make money whilst not receiving much traffic from your website?

All the hosts we ranked on our list are very reasonable and offer everything for someone on a budget. In the long run, your time and sanity is far more important than a few dollars a month which gives you peace of mind.