Free vs. Paid Website Hosting

Luckily, one of the things that has not changed about the internet is the prevalence of free website hosting. Though it never quite delivered the return on investment speculated in the 90's, internet advertising has proven to be somewhat lucrative. Many websites are happy to give you space on their servers in exchange for a piece of the real estate on your website. These ads are usually banner pictures which change with every new visit to your website, and the best ones will even target your particular audience.

Evaluating Free vs. Paid Website Hosting

The cost of free vs. paid website hosting may be more than money, and that's the factor that really needs to be taken into consideration.

Paid Website Hosting

Paid website hosting is often quite cheap, almost free – as little as $12 will get you a monthly space on a web server. This has the advantage of giving you complete control over the appearance of your site. There is no extraneous advertising except what you actually decide to include. As with so many things, though, you get what you pay for, and these servers may not be trusted, or they may not have a very fast connection to the internet. They may be machines that are less than reliable, or that do not have good backup protocols in place.

By paying a little more you can get additional services included in your web hosting. Features like databases, shopping cart e-business solutions, and other more advanced web functions may be options. These are all things that can be set up on a bare-bones web server by a competent system administrator, but not all businesses actually have that kind of expertise available. If they do, it may not be cost-effective to use their services for that particular feature.

The issue of support is even more important. Paying for the time of a staff of competent and reliable individuals who keep the servers running at 99% uptime or better is almost always worth it. Having a support system in place that will take your calls or emails 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, will help everyone involved with your website sleep better. Whether it's simply remembering a password, or as critical an issue as restoring your site from a backup, a good support system is probably the primary reason to put out the cash necessary for quality website hosting.

Free Website Hosting

Sometimes, though, the barrier to entry is too high, and the money simply isn't there for support and an ad-free site. For this reason, there are sites, such as the following, which offer free web hosting in exchange for ad space on your website:

• Freewebs offers a simple point-and-click interface to create new websites, along with many social networking and other web 2.0 tools.
• Dot Easy is an example of a "sort of free" web hosting package. They will give you 100 mb of free hosting space (which is not very much) for absolutely free – as long as you register your domain name with them. Many companies do this, as a lure to get people to register through their site. The hosting offered is usually fairly sparse, and website support is almost nonexistent, but it is a valid alternative.
• Bravenet offers a wide variety of widgets to bring live content to your site, which can keep it fresh for people to want to come visit without an exorbitant effort on your part. One of the biggest problems faced by any web site creator is keeping the site populated with fresh content.

With these kinds of options, whether free or paid, a website is easy to publish online with your own voice and message for the entire internet.