The Problem with Free Web Hosting Plans
In my opinion, free web hosting is one of the most misunderstood
concepts on the web today. Free web hosting plans are becoming
increasingly popular as new webmasters bite into the idea
without actually analyzing the consequences. I myself spent
many years, at the start of my webmaster career, using free
web hosting plans. This experience has giving me an insight
into the down-side of free web hosting plans that many people
seem to miss.
Would Coke promote Pepsi on their website?Although the
rhetorical question above seems ludicrous, this concept
is one of the fundamental problems with free web hosting
plans. Forced advertising is the way that hosting companies
can afford to provide "free" hosting. Whether
it be through pop-ups, pop-unders, headline ads, or implanted
adsense you will be hosting advertisements on your website
that generate revenue for your hosting company whether you
like it or not. Not only is this annoying it can also ruin
the look of your page; the majority of the time you cannot
control what the ads look like or where they go, they are
simply dropped down onto your site and there is nothing
you can do.
Traffic JamsThe bottom line in web hosting is that bandwidth
(data transfer) costs money and if your plan is free it
is most likely your bandwidth will be limited. Too many
times I have attempted to access a web site hosted on a
free server and been given the message: "This user
has acceded their bandwidth limits, please try again next
month". As a webmaster this can be infuriating. Imagine
building a solid page, marketing it, gaining an audience,
and then losing that audience because your page is not allowed
anymore hits for the month.
SEO woesThis is a problem that caused me a ton of frustration,
but in the end taught mea lot about how search engines work
and how search engines handle name resolution. In almost
every case free web hosting plans do not allow you to point
a domain name (www.yoursite.com) to an actual page. Instead
you are forced to use a concept called URL redirection.
URL redirection allows a webmaster to identify a site that
the URL should point to. So if a user types in www.example.com
and we have configured it to redirect to www.freehost/users/mysite.html
it will end up on that page. This does not seem like much
of an issue until you begin trying to get your website indexed
in the search engines. So you submit your site (www.example.com)
to some directories and you ake some good link partners
and then you start to wonder, why am I not being listed
in the SE's? I have 100 solid back links pointing to www.example.com,
what is happening. The problem is that www.example.com has
no data, it has no content, it simply redirects to your
actual page at www.freehost/users/mysite.html. SE's not
only will not index a page with no data or content but they
may even view this as an attempt to fool their algorithm,
thus banning your domain name. The only work around is to
forget the domain name and optimize for your free hosting
address, which is not really an acceptable work around.
But wait!Although I am a strong believer that free web
hosting is not the way to go it is possible to find a free
web host that works for you. There are some out there that
do not force advertising, do not limit your bandwidth, and
will allow pointed domains. The problem is finding one that
does all three. If you are a serious, or even only slightly
serious, webmaster take the hit and pay the money for web
hosting. In the end you can get an awesome web hosting plan
for as low as $5.95 a month, and trust me this will be WELL
worth the money.
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