But there are many great things in life that you really need to pay for in order to acquire. This is true mostly with new
stuff like gadgets, cars, and whatnot.
To get the best, you have to shell out some money. When it comes to webhosting this may be true because free webhosting services are great for a small site starting out.
However once a site gets busy and is growing, the free option is not really recommended, particularly for ecommerce websites. The reason why is because free webhosting companies usually cannot provide three important things: a good up-time guarantee, good support turnaround time, and quality customer service. You get what you pay for.
Good and Realistic Up-time Guarantee
A good webhosting service should be able to provide a realistic up-time guarantee. While most free webhosting services may indeed promise to keep your website throughout the year, they usually do not have enough resources to guarantee this.
Free webhosting services are a bargain for a small hobby site, but are bound to be subject to glitches and technical problems and you cannot really complain as much since your not paying for their service anyway. The service is free and ranting does not make much of a difference unlike for paid companies who see you as a customer that should be king (or queen) rather than just a free member.
Of course paid webhosting services may also be subject to some technical glitches ? they do get downtime sometimes, but since they have more resources to deal with problems, they can guarantee a better downtime than free services. Plus since you are paying you can demand customer service. Realistically, paid webhosting services may not be able to guarantee 100% downtime, but they can guarantee up to 99.9% downtime, which is pretty good compared to how much free services can promise. Because of this, free webhosting services are not really recommended especially for business websites that require their sites to be up and running at all times, or at least 99% of the time.
Good Support Turnaround Time
Another important thing that a webhosting service should make available for their clients is a good support turnaround time. Webhosting services should be able to respond to your inquiries as fast as possible. If you encounter problems like downtime and send an inquiry or request to your web host, you need them to respond immediately, or else your website and your business might be compromised.
You might not be able to expect this from free services. You didn't pay so why should they jump when you say so? At the most you can expect them to have only web-based or email inquiry aside from a preset troubleshooting FAQ page. While these could suffice for minor problems, they may not work for dire situations where you need immediate action.
Only paid companies could guarantee good support turnaround time because they are the only ones who can usually afford to hire support staff to work around the clock. Most paid webhosting companies have 24-hour support teams that could help you practically anytime unlike free services who probably only have voluntary teams that work from time-to-time.
Quality Customer Service
The above is very much connected to the quality of support service. You should be able to obtain a high quality of customer service from your web host. Not only should they be able to respond to you fast when you have problems, they should also be able to provide you with useful answers that can actually fix your dilemmas.
Free services usually do not have customer service personnel who are specifically trained to troubleshoot problems. Again, they might just have volunteers who provide services when they can, but they most likely do not work in an established customer service system that paid services implement. But hey, the free price is right.
Paid services actually hire and train people to work on customer service specifically. They are bound to be ready to help you when you have problems, and they are highly skilled to give practical and effective solutions to most, if not all of the glitches you might encounter.
Free stuff are always welcome because money is indeed useful to hang onto, however there are important things that you cannot really just cut corners about. If you own a business website, it is not recommended for you to get free webhosting services.
You might get something good for something free but you cannot always be sure that you would get what you need for your business. Free webshosting is great for a hobby or family site or something simple. But when you get busy and professional you need to switch to some professional webhosting too.
Free Webhosting With Domain
If you have a new business that you are starting up and want to find the most cost effective way of making your own website, then you should consider free webhosting. This is not as daunting as many people make it out to be and if you find the most appropriate free web sites, you can easily set your website up yourself and start making an impression in your line of work.
Using free webhosting is very simple and best of all, it is free. You will simply need to sign up and viola; you will have your very own website. You can register your own domain at .com or .net, but if you want free domains then you can try one of the new ones at co.cc or .name domains. All you will have to do then is forward the URL to your new domain and instead of having something like companyname.hosting1234.com, you will have companyname.co.cc which looks more professional.
Some web hosting companies will also offer a free webhosting services for a specified time if you register your domain with them. This is also a great opportunity that you can take advantage of. This is great if you have a specific look that you want your website to have. Setting up a free website on a free hosting site will be more restrictive as you will get site builder software with free templates to use to make your free web site. While these are easy to use most of the time, you do get some that are quite involved and where you will need to research a bit more about PHP scripts and adding link URLs inside the content.
If you want to get your website out into the marketplace and make sure that people know about it, you will also have to write the content with search engines in mind and add your own keywords and site description so that search engines like Google and Yahoo can find your website. It is best to create your site and have all the content in place before you publish it, as this will be more favorable to search engines.
Using free webhosting is the perfect way to create a business website when you are just starting out and have no capital as such. You can do basically anything on some of the websites and this means you can add modules and software like shopping carts, polls, photo galleries and much more. They include various amounts of page links and some of them even have unlimited bandwidth which is wonderful for online shopping sites. Setting up a free website is also easy because many of the free webhosting companies offer 24 hour support so that you can figure out how to work the site builders and you can check anything you are uncertain about.
Many people think that free webhosting is not reliable and that having free web sites are not professional, but if you find the perfect site or your needs and set it up correctly, you will be the one laughing at the end of the day when you reap the rewards. Just by doing a little bit of digging and more research, you can add applications and find the most appropriate free web site for you type of business.
Both Monica Nelson & Adam001 Drake001 are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
