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Archive for the ‘Free Hosting’ Category

Web site hosting service companies on the Internet permit the user to make their web site accessible through the World Wide Web. There are huge numbers of companies that offer web space on their server for their customers and also offer Internet connectivity in general in a data center. There can be various types of web site hosting companies. The main classification is the free web site hosting and the paid web site hosting service companies.

In case of free web site hosting, the user has the right to upload his or her web site content on the server space that is provided by the web site hosting company without any cost. This type of web site hosting service is great for people who are new to to internet and plan to get familiar with web site creation and functionality of web servers. On the other hand, to get your web site uploaded on a web space that is provided by a paid web site hosting company, you need to pay the company periodic fees. The fee amount may vary from company to company. The paid web site hosting companies are best suited for professional web site owners. People who need large web space to upload their web sites and who expect a certain amount of web site visitors which is restricted on free hosting accounts to a minimum.

The revenue that the paid web hosting service companies get is through the fee that is paid to the company by the web site owners. In case of free web site hosting companies, the main source of income are the ads and banners that can be placed on their clients web pages.

The main advantage of using a free web site hosting service is that they are free of cost and hence make a perfect choice for people who are new into the business and are just looking to start out. They are perfect for people who just want to display a minimum content on the World Wide Web in small amount of web space. The other advantage of using the free web site hosting service is that most of these companies provide integrated, easy tools to upload the pages on to the hosting account. They do this realizing the fact that the free web site hosting services are generally utilized by the newbies.

There are also certain disadvantages of using the free web site hosting services. When using the free web site hosting service, you are forced to place the ads and banners by the web site hosting company on your web pages. Also the revenue that is obtained by the ads goes to the web site company. In case of paid web site hosting service, ads and banners placed on your web site are according to your will and the revenue of the banners and ads placed on your web site goes in your pocket. Also in some case of free web site hosting, the domain name of your web site starts with the web site hosting company name followed by your web site name. This is not the case of paid web site hosting service. You get a unique web site domain. The web space provided by free web site hosting service is limited whereas in case of paid web site hosting service you can buy the web space according to your requirements.

People say that the best things in life are free and this could be quite true for many aspects of life. The basic necessities such as air, sunlight, among many other things are still accessible to people without bills or tag prices.

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.

Please excuse me if you are an experienced internet marketer, but I remember how little I knew when I first began my career in internet marketing, so I am going to assume that my reader is totally ignorant on what is about to follow.

THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE SELECTING ANY WEB HOST

As in any business, you need to do some research and have some sort of business plan before you start committing yourself to contracts and debts, even if only debts of time and emotion. While there is no guarantee that any new business will succeed, according to the small business administration you have a better chance of success if you have done research and have a business plan BEFORE you become involved in your new endeavor.

In terms of the web site itself, you will need to have some idea of how big you expect your website to be. will you be selling product from the website, or merely hosting links to affiliate programs? Are you going to have a lot of graphics, or mainly text? How much help will you need from the web host in setting up your web site? Will you need an email account? These are just a few questions you might ask yourself.

Questions you might want to get answered about the web hosting service might include information about how reliable their service is, their reputation in the internet community, or if your site will be able to grow as your business grows. Naturally, if you ask the web host themselves about these sorts of things you will probably just get positive answers, so find some forum where internet marketers hang out, read their discussions and ask some questions of them. Most are more than willing to help, although some may have a web hosting service that they are trying to promote, so keep your eye open for that.

HOW CAN WEB HOSTING BE FREE?

Ever heard the old term – TANSTAAFL? The letters stand for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Even an internet marketing acquaintance who lets you in on a really valuable deal or gives you a “free” gift such as an information packed internet marketing ebook probably has a profit or promotion link to it in some way. Nothing personal, it’s in the blood.

That’s why you can get “free” web hosting. The hosting service normally will put ads on your free website. They either are affiliated with the company advertised, they are being paid for the advertising, they are the company advertised, or they expect to gain in some other way as you go about building and promoting YOUR new free website. Every time someone links to your website or a search engine indexes and adds your website to its list, the web hosting service has just picked up an opportunity to add new customers.

ADVANTAGES OF FREE WEB HOSTING.

The obvious and major advantage is that it is free. You can start a website for your internet business without the costs of registering a domain name or paying for hosting. It can also serve as a training site or you can use it to test new promotions and products at no cost. For more advanced internet marketing pros, it can be the cornerstone of a major internet marketing ploy, but that is outside the scope of this article. Since the sites ARE free, you can try your business website on several different services, and you might learn that it is easier to work with one than another, or that one gets indexed quicker by search engines. One free service I use sometimes gets my site listed on Google and other search engines before I have even done any promotion for it.

DISADVANTAGES OF FREE WEB HOSTING.

Probably, the single largest disadvantage in most peoples’ eyes will be the ads that clutter their site or pop-up when the site is visited or the visitor departs. Not only does this tend to obscure YOUR message from your visitors’ eyes, but it may also cut short the time they spend on your site. They go elsewhere to a more profession looking site, or they follow one of the web host’s advertisements…which was the reason you got the site free.

SELECTING YOUR FREE WEB HOSTING SERVICE.

There is no one service which will please everyone. This is where you will have to go back to your business plan and questions and balance one site against the other. You can find free web hosting services by searches on Google and other search engines for “free web hosting”, or by visiting sites such as http://www.hostsearch.com/ .

DOES FREE WEB HOSTING WORK?

I started my internet business with free websites, and many of those free sites not only are still up and functioning, but are also sending traffic to my business, and earning money for me. However, as my business expanded, I found that purchasing my own domain names and building “real” websites produced even more traffic and business. However, if you are getting started and don’t really know what you are doing and don’t have a lot of money to throw around, free web hosting is probably the way you will want to go.

SOME FREE WEB HOSTING SITES TO GET YOU STARTED.

Although I use other hosting services as well, two of the ones I use most commonly are:

http://free-business-hosting.com and http://freeservers.com

Good luck in your internet marketing endeavors.