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DEBATE : Free Hosting Vs Premium Hosting! What to Choose ?

Free Web Hosting Vs Paid Web Hosting

With the Increase in economy, new entrepreneurs, bloggers & Internet marketers are looking for various ways of saving money as much as they can for growing their startups. Either they are trying to save money while building web tools or hiring web developers, marketers or SEO experts. Even some are looking for free web hosting but they really don’t understand the cost of their business doing this. Let’s have a look about Pro’s and Con’s of Free web hosting and Paid web hosting.

Free Web Hosting Vs Paid Web Hosting

What is Free Web Hosting and Paid Web Hosting?

Free web hosting is a web hosting service that is free usually supported by some kind of advertisements. There are some free web hosting that do not use advertisements but they put on some limits on usage. Generally free web hosting provide a sub domain like “subdomain.blogspot.com” or directory like “www.domain.com/niche”. While there are some free hosts which offer custom domain along with web hosting.
While Paid web hosting services are not free but paid, you have to spends some bucks to host your websites and blogs over their, they offer you complete control over your server. There may or may not be limitation on usage it depends on the web host plan you had chosen, even you can host multiple websites on a single server.

What to Choose Premium or Free Web Hosting & Why ?

There are some points you need to consider while choosing web hosting, In this post I will keep some points in front of you which will help you decide what hosting to choose and why! :

1) Appearance

When you use free web hosting your URL looks like “niche.blogspost.com” or “www.xyz.com/name”. In this example blogspot is free web hosting platform. If you look at the structure of domain it doesn’t give you the appearance you are looking for nor your customers will like it! You can buy custom domain and host them on this free web hosting platform but there are still some limitation.

While in premium hosting you have the full control to choose domain name like I have “www.moneygossips.com” even I can create subdomains like blog.moneygossips.com etc. which not  only help me attract customers but targeted customers.

2) Outgrowing your Free web hosting

If you move from free web hosting to premium web hosting with custom domain at any time in future, you will not be able to upload a .htaccess file to redirect search engine visitors to your new web hosting. To let your search engine visitors to  know that you have moved to new web hosting you have to use instructions in .htaccess file to 301 Permanently redirect your visitors to new location.

Also you will not be able to use .htaccess file to permanently redirect all your visitors and search engines to a particular page when you delete or remove some blog page or posts.
After years of building a successful blog/website on free hosting, your efforts will be lost and you have to start working from scratch. This is one of the major drawback of using free web hosts like blogspot.com or wordpress.com

3) Custom Error Page

One more problem with free hosting is that you can not use custom error pages. Custom error pages are used by web servers to your visitors that there is some error. For Example : 404 Error is shown to your visitors when any page or blog post is not found on your web space. On free web hosting your visitors will be shown company’s stock page which is going to provide any information on how to find what your visitors is looking for.

While in Premium hosting you can design your own custom error page which might be attractive and will give your visitors proper direction about their query.

4) Free Isn’t Free Every time

Have you ever though how free web hosts make money to run their servers and other operations ? Answer is clear i.e Advertising. Yes advertising they insert ads on your pages, to earn some bucks so that they can run proper operations and their servers. You will have no control what advertisements will be shown over their.
Using Paid web hosting you will have the full control over your ads and you can make money by using Google Ads, Infolinks and many more.

5) Free Web Hosting doesn’t Last Forever

When you use free web hosting there is no assure guarantee that they will stick around forever. Even Large providers of free hosting shut their services down. If you don’t believe here is an example below :

Yahoo! have closed their 360 Services in July 2009

While Paid hosting, last long forever even if they don’t they provide daily backups of your websites each time, so there is no way you will loose your precious data or hard work.

6) Limited Features with Free web hosting

Free web hosts put some limits on what you can & cannot do, you are limited to particular amount of usage. Even some paid hosting have some limits but there are different plans which exist over their which provide unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited emails etc.

Free Web Hosting Save Money is a Misconception!

Those who think free hosting are the good way to save money are not analyzing the future aspects of websites. Initially all want to save money while creating a business but to save some bucks in web domain, web hosting, web design is going to cost you more money in long run.

  • It doesn’t provide Professional appearance to your business
  • You will face problem when moving site from free web host to premium hosts
  • You will surely lose incoming backlinks
  • Sometimes you also have to redesign your website causing more money

Even I lost my 1st blog which was running on a free web hosting, reason because of not getting back proper support. After that I moved on to premium hosting of Hostgator and it is running properly, if you also want to buy Hostgator hosting get 60% OFF now as June Flash sale is going on till 12th of June 2015.

Let us know what you think about Free Hosting and Premium Hosting! Join Debate below and provide vote to what you like!

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