If you are new to creating and hosting websites, you should first experiment with free hosting. Web developers, who have been in the business for a long time, will not be sticking around with free hosting as it is not reliable. Free hosting is great because there are no costs and you can really do anything with it. If you want to test out a script or design; free hosting will allow you to do that. There are many drawbacks of choosing free hosting, however there are some benefits. In the end, it all comes down to the type of website you are creating. The purpose of the website will be a criterion you should be looking into as well. If you are opening a small home business website, free hosting should not be considered. Free hosting will only diminish the positive impression your business has in people.

Let’s take a look at some of the drawbacks in choosing free hosting. Firstly, when you sign up for free hosting; you will be prompted to choose a domain. Free hosting companies do not always support your own domain. Often times, they will provide you with a sub-domain. It will be in the following format; freehosting.com/yourusername or yourusername.freehosting.com. It can be quite inconvenient to use a sub-domain, so you will have to find an alternative. If you have your visitors visit your sub-domain, and later you choose to buy a domain, you will loose a lot of valuable visitors. The other major drawback is that your usage is very limited. When you sign up, the amount of space and bandwidth will be allotted to only about 250MB and 2GB bandwidth. This is not enough in many cases, so you are forced to look for paid hosting. Extra features such as databases, emails, and stats will be often disabled or limited to only one. So, before you sign up; it is wise to read through the site to see what is offered. Free hosting companies do not charge their customers, so they try to maximize the amount of accounts on one server by limiting resources.

You are not paying anything to free hosting companies, so how do they generate income? The trust is that, you are giving them the opportunity make money from you. When you create a site, the hosting company will automatically display ads on your website. This can not be disabled by you, because it is programmed within the server. Every single page you create on that server, will display the companies advertising. When your visitors come to your website and click on those ads, the company makes money. This is how they are able to pay for the servers and maintenance. So, if you have a very busy website, you are allowing the hosting company to make a ton of money from your website. If you were to obtain cheap web hosting, you can place ads on your site and make money to cover your hosting expenses and still make a profit.

In essence, you should try free hosting to experience it. If you are unhappy, you should move onto a paid hosting solution.