Just finished your first website? So it’s the time to look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first qustion probably will be whether to choose free or paid hosting service. Let’s have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.
Free web hosting:
(+) It’s for free. You don’t need to pay for domain name.
(-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username. As I noticed above, the advantage is that you don’t need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this problem but it is not the point of this article).
(-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages – usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn’t allow it.
(-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwidth then paid hosts and a lot of them don’t offer futures like PHP and MySQL.
(-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions...