The technology advanced more than ever, and with the boom of startups and online entrepreneurs, it has never been easier to establish your online presence. Every new beginning, whether it would be a blog, e-shop, online agency or any service, is money cautious. Nobody wants to spend a fortune on something they are not sure will justify and bring the value back. Just as there are ways to save money, there are paths that shouldn't be cut short. Choosing the best web hosting for the start of your online journey is one of them.
Web hosting is undoubtedly one of the more significant outlays of a new business, however, it’s the kind of expense that is worth making, as the success of the company largely depends on it. There are many pros to free hosting, and it’s perfect if you haven’t created a website before. Simply put, it’s a great learning platform, where you can experiment with different settings, capacity, and features. However, when it comes to your actual website, there are more downsides to free hosting than benefits.
Branding
One of the more critical aspects of your online presence is your brand. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting a blog or an online portfolio to showcase your talent, you want people to remember your name. Professional appearance is what says business is serious. Online, first impression is your domain name, and it’s the first thing people see or hear about you. With most of the free web hosting platforms, rather than getting a free domain name, you get a free sub-domain. It means that the free provider you use to host your website on, will show up on your domain in the URL bar and your customers not only will doubt your credibility but will also know what hosting platform you use, for example — yourbrand(dot)WordPress(dot)com. To get the provider’s name taken out of your URL, you will eventually have to buy a domain name or a hosting that provides a free domain name. It is strongly recommended to do so at the start.
Advertising
Just like any other online business, free web hosting providers need to earn money. By providing free services, there aren’t many ways left to gain revenue, therefore, most of the free web hosting comes with enforced advertising. The types of advertising may vary from provider to provider, however, most of them will not only show unavoidable adverts on your control panel but also on your published website to your visitors. This not only leaves you with much less space for your affiliate marketing but also once again, will make you look unprofessional. With so much online advertising already out there, you don’t want to risk losing your website traffic due to more unwanted advertising.
Customer Support
If you are creating your first website, chances are, your overall knowledge of web, features you might need, hosting resources your website might require, is quite low. Especially at the beginning, getting as much help as you can is useful. Free web hosting providers are keeping their expenses to the minimum, therefore, most of the time, there is no customer support available. With free web hosting, not only you will have to setup, maintain, and update your website yourself, but also solve issues such as downtime or feature dysfunction. If you are tech savvy and already know the answers to some of these problems, customer support might not be essential, but if you're just starting your webmastering career, it’s worth considering paid hosting services with professional, always available customer support.
Limited Features and Resources
Once you’ve built your website, it’s attracting traffic, and the revenue is growing, the resources and features provided by free hosting platform will eventually be not enough for your growing website. Resources such as bandwidth, storage, and CPU speed are drawn from servers hosting provider is using to supply a website, and, unfortunately, none of the free providers are yet able to equip your website with unlimited resources. A scalable hosting environment is essential for any business that wants to succeed, and paid hosting can provide it.
Another significant aspect of a growing business that needs to be addressed is featuring. Some of the free web hosting platforms have plugins and add-ons that are free or can be bought online, in case your website starts lacking functionality but many of them don’t have it. This might come in handy when, let’s say, you want to turn the portfolio of your work into an e-commerce store. WordPress, one of the most well-known free hosting platforms, offer an e-commerce plugin WooCommerce, however, other free platforms don’t have this functionality. It’s worth thinking about the future of your website and how it might expand before creating your website on a free web hosting platform.
Conclusion
Time well spent is of great value to any business, but it is essential to the one that is taking off. Maintaining and developing a website takes time, and managing one on a free hosting platform consumes even more of it as you’re are responsible for developing it yourself. Your time management skills will become invaluable, once your business is taking off and you will want to dedicate more of it to the product or service you’re selling online rather than the technical side of it. Free web hosting providers, as mentioned above, not only do not provide any customer support but also, do not maintain, update or develop websites. Maintenance and development takes a lot of effort, skill and time and eventually, you would instead dedicate that time to your business than the maintenance of the website.
Renat is a marketing specialist of Hosting.review - a quickly growing trademark for in-depth web hosting reviews. Outside working hours, he loves to spend his time reading and learning something new about different cultures.
