Free Web-hosting Services
Although free web-hosting services aren’t as prevalent as in the past, you still want to avoid placing your web-based business in their hands. Here’s why:
• You will be severely restricted in the things that you can do with your website.
• You won’t be able to use your own domain name. You’ll have to settle for something like www.freewebhosting.com/yourcompany.
• Although free web-hosting services normally give you between 2 and 10 megabytes of server space, many require you to display their advertising banners (or put up with annoying pop-up windows carrying their ads) and many won’t allow you to display advertising from any other company.
• Most won’t give you the easy-to-use FTP services to upload your web pages. This means you will have to find another way to put your changes on the web server.
• Few, if any, of them provide database access.
• Very few will give you CGI-bins.
• Few, if any, provide secure servers for credit card purchases.
• Forget about data backups.
• Search engines will normally take three to four times longer to list
the submitted pages. Also search engines give more “weightage” to sites
that have their own domain names.
• You won’t get unlimited autoresponders, nor the POP email accounts you need.
• Most free web-hosting services will not give you access to your own server log files.
• You and your customers will experience frequent downtimes because of the heavy loads on the hosting company’s servers.
• You will find that technical support is almost non-existent.
Although free web-hosting services aren’t as prevalent as in the past, you still want to avoid placing your web-based business in their hands. Here’s why:
• You will be severely restricted in the things that you can do with your website.
• You won’t be able to use your own domain name. You’ll have to settle for something like www.freewebhosting.com/yourcompany.
• Although free web-hosting services normally give you between 2 and 10 megabytes of server space, many require you to display their advertising banners (or put up with annoying pop-up windows carrying their ads) and many won’t allow you to display advertising from any other company.
• Most won’t give you the easy-to-use FTP services to upload your web pages. This means you will have to find another way to put your changes on the web server.
• Few, if any, of them provide database access.
• Very few will give you CGI-bins.
• Few, if any, provide secure servers for credit card purchases.
• Forget about data backups.
• Search engines will normally take three to four times longer to list
the submitted pages. Also search engines give more “weightage” to sites
that have their own domain names.
• You won’t get unlimited autoresponders, nor the POP email accounts you need.
• Most free web-hosting services will not give you access to your own server log files.
• You and your customers will experience frequent downtimes because of the heavy loads on the hosting company’s servers.
• You will find that technical support is almost non-existent.