There are advantages and disadvantages with everything in life. The same could be said for free or paid web hosting. The advantage of free hosting is of course that it is free. This sort of hosting such as GeoCities is great for personal and family sites.
Why do these providers give you a free site? Your free site will attract visitors. You will invite visitors; your visitors in turn will invite still others and so on. Your free web hosting provider will place ads on your site. Some of your visitors may click in the ad links provided. This brings income for your free web host provider.
If all you need is a site where you can display personal or family thing even photos a free site will be all you require. If on the other hand you want to use it to promote an internet business a free site could be a hindrance.
Internet marketing is about driving traffic to your site, gaining their trust and having a laser focused squeeze page. Free web hosting fails here. You can lose the focus on your squeeze page because of the ads that your free web hosting provider has placed on your page. You also need to come across as a professional marketer that can be trusted. Free web hosting will give you the appearance of an amateur. In the end your free site could be costing you sales.
If you are promoting a product you will always be better off with a paid site. You will need to choose the hosting package that will suit your needs. Some of the benefits of a paid site are:
1. Can create a number of email accounts. This means that your email address will look more professional. Your email will look like this yourname@yoursite.com that will look a lot more professional than yourname@yahoo.com or any of the free email sites. I personally won’t do business with anyone who uses a free email account as their support address; I feel it’s too risky.
2. You will be able to set up scripts to run on your site. Both CGI and PHP.
3. You will also have access to MySql databases
4. You will have a much larger amount of disk space available to you.
5. You will have the use of an easy to use control panel. This will also give you greater control over your site.
These were just a few of the reasons why you need to choose a paid web hosting provider there are many more.
You can start out small and grow. Your web hosting provider should be able to increase the limits to your account painlessly. So when the package you chose first becomes too restrictive you can get the limits increased. By this time you will already be making an income.
Summing it all up: Free web hosting is great for family and personal sites also for picture sites. If you need to sell on the internet you will be far better served by choosing paid web hosting.
