Everybody has already noticed all the new “Free” Professional Website Hosting that is now available. More and more free hosts are showing up every day. Many hosting companies are taking advantage of the decreasing cost of computing power and hardware, as are many others, to upgrade and expand their systems, ending up with excessive amounts of processing power and storage. Frequently new hosting companies provide free hosting accounts simply to attract new leads.

This isn't a new phenomenon, hosting companies trying to grow their business have given away limited hosting services for years. Traditional free hosting accounts had advertising and were extremely limited until you upgraded for paid services. Today this has all changed and here is what you can and should expect in a free hosting account.

A full Control Panel (CP) should be available allowing you to manage everything about your hosting account. The CP should allow you to easily access and manage email accounts for your domain, see real-time visitor statistics, and offer total browser based file-management for your website.

Privacy and territory are serious business on the internet. No professional hosting company should ever need to add their banners to the top of your website pages. It just isn't necessary! That is your valuable advertising space and it is easy enough to generate a significant revenue with it for yourself.

Another way to spot a good free host is to check whether they offer extra's like Frontpage extensions and access to edit your databases directly online? Do they have current versions of Perl, PHP5 and MySQL5 available? These are simple for a knowledgeable host to offer with all of their free accounts.

Applications are a big selling point! Which, if any, do they make available? You should expect to see a good selection of Open Source software available for installation and use on your website. Things like private discussion forums, auto-responders and opt-in newsletter managers, a current version of Wordpress, even a complete Joomla CMS. Everyone wants or needs these applications available on their website. They should all be available for simple installation directly from your CP.

If you have found a free hosting account offering everything I mentioned so far you can be sure your website is sitting pretty. If you haven't yet, keep looking. You can and should find a host that will offer all the services described. There really is no reason you should “have” to pay for hosting again.

There is a single caveat everyone needs to understand about any free service. Nothing Free is Guaranteed! While it is likely your free hosting account is using the same resources as paid accounts, you have no Guaranteed Service Level Agreement. Without that what can you say if your website goes offline for a while or your email service stops working?

A Service Level Agreement means you can expect an answer to your inquiries from someone at the company. This is part of any good contract and is what obliges a company to provide their service as promised. A good free host will offer this type of service if requested for a small monthly fee. You'll get a specified amount of bandwidth each month and usually lots of extra storage to go with it. Most of all you'll get support, someone to call who will answer your questions and problems.

This is actually what professional hosting companies should do best. Simply providing the hosting account and a Service Level Agreement isn't enough for most people. Do they notify their members of upcoming service outages or software upgrades? Do they answer their phone when there are unexpected service problems with your site? What kind of support do they provide installing website software purchased from a third party?

We all know quality service is often in “who” you're paying rather than “how much”. If your free host is corrupting the look and feel of your website with their giant ad banner, if they're not very helpful with their free clients, or if they aren't offering you any pre-installed web applications much less access to a database, then you are not using the best free host. If they're not providing quality and professional services to their free clients how well can you expect to be treated if you were paying for their hosting services.