Is free web page hosting ever a good choice? We look at the free web hosting market and how free hosting services have changed in recent times

Free web hosting is something that many people choose when first starting out online for one reason and one reason only - the price. But is free web page hosting worth it, in either the short or long term? The rise of free web hosting services in recent years proves that there is without doubt huge demand for no cost hosting and there has been no shortage of companies and marketers keen to tap into what is seen as such a lucrative market.

The first companies offering free hosting were able to do so by using advertising revenues to offset their costs and usually, to turn free hosting into a profitable venture for themselves. For you, the consumer, such a tempting offer was hard to resist. The reality of building a site on a free hosting account however, often turned into a rather frustrating and sometimes worthless end user experience.

The early pioneers were often hastily set up and after they had raked in the money, users often found themselves high and dry when the free hosting provider went offline overnight, never to return. The fact that users were not out of pocket may have cushioned the blow, but all the work customers had done was invariably lost, along with the time invested. For those who signed up with a more stable free hosting company, the downside was usually the ads that they were forced to run on their websites, over which they had no control. These were usually not remotely relevant to the content of the site, and often so intrusive that visitors would be scared away pretty quickly.

Add to this the fact that free web hosting users were usually stuck with a sub domain name and found it almost impossible to achieve any kind of worthwhile results in the search engines results pages, and free web page hosting started to look far less appealing. Many free web hosting services also left a lot to be desired in the reliability stakes with sites often being offline and unavailable to internet users. This was annoying for many, but to anyone trying to run some kind of online business it was disastrous.

Because of all these things, you will doubtless have read in many places that free hosting is really not worth the price you pay, particularly if your site has any commercial aspirations. I would not disagree with this even today, because anyone operating a business online usually needs far more than most free web hosting plans can offer. However, the choices in 2008 are far greater than they have been in the past.

Several free hosting providers now offer PHP and MySQL and some pretty decent storage and bandwidth numbers. There are even services that give cPanel access and the ability to host your own domain name. For many people, particularly those on a very tight budget, perhaps free hosting is still worth a look. If you are just looking to host a non commercial website, or perhaps just a place to host marketing squeeze pages and the like, free hosting might well be a viable choice.

As with most things, if you get them for free, there is usually a trade off, but the free web hosting industry has certainly improved in recent times and consumer choices are more wide ranging than they once were.

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Everyone likes to get something for free. But as the existence of spam shows, free isn’t always good. Sometimes, it’s downright harmful. Deciding whether it’s worth the cost to pay for hosting involves a number of complex considerations.

Hosting companies that offer free services obviously can’t stay in business from the money they make from you, since there isn’t any. So why do they offer free hosting and how do they make money? Why should you care, so long as you get yours? Because, in reality, there’s a price of some kind for everything, even something that’s free.

Free hosting may come from a company doing a promotion to attract business. They expect to demonstrate their value, then charge an existing customer base fees to make up for what they lost by the (short term) offer. It’s in essence a form of advertising.

But free hosting is offered by lots of companies that are not dedicated to managing servers for websites. Google, Yahoo and thousands of others provide a modest amount of disk space and a domain name on a server for free. Users are free to do anything they like with it, though if the load becomes excessive you can be shut down.

That introduces one of the more obvious drawbacks to free hosting: resource limitations.

Typically free hosting offers a relatively small amount of space. That’s often enough to host a few dozen pages. But an active site can quickly run out of room.

A more serious limitation is load.

Free hosting often places strict limitations on the allowed amount of bandwidth consumed. If you become a well-visited site, when users start banging away on the server, you can be asked to leave or simply be blocked for the rest of the month. Or, you may be permitted a certain quantity of total bandwidth use per month. Once it’s reached, no one else can reach your site until the beginning of a new month.

At the same time, you will certainly be sharing equipment with thousands of other sites. Their load can affect your performance, prompting you to move. Migrating an established site brings with it a number of thorny issues that might be better avoided in the first place.

Free hosting has another potential downside: lack of support. When you pay for hosting you typically get, at least in theory, a certain level of support. Backups in case of disaster recovery from a hack or server failure, assistance in analyzing connection problems… the variety is endless. With free hosting you usually get none of that.

A company or site that offers free hosting will usually recover a disk or server that fails completely and you’ll be back up when they do. But if only selected portions of the drive fail, or you lose a few files through a virus attack or accidental deletion, you have to rely on backups to recover. A free service will usually come with no such option.

That may not be a problem if you have a small site. You can make copies of everything at another location and simply recover the site yourself - if you have the discipline to keep it current and the skills to make and restore the copy.

Free hosting will typically come with a few email addresses, intended to be used for administration and other tasks. But if your needs grow beyond that, you’ll need to seek another option. The email service also comes with minimal oversight. The server may be protected against spam attacks and provide virus scanning. But few free services will provide even minimal help with any issues that arise.

But the most serious limitation may have nothing to do with any technical issues. Free hosting services often require that your site’s pages carry some form of advertising that pays the host, not you. That may be fine for you, or it may not. Individual circumstances vary.

On the other hand, if you’re just starting out, a free hosting option can be a great way to learn needed skills and a few of the potential pitfalls. You can set up a site, learn how to maintain and improve it, and not care too much if it gets hacked. Freely hosted sites can be a great platform for learning the ropes.

Free services don’t usually offer any of the features that an active, commercial site will need sooner or later. So if you plan to grow, it may be reasonable to get the free service for a while, knowing you’ll have to migrate when you become popular. But in the long run, you get what you pay for and you may need to pay for what you want.

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