Should You Use Free Web Hosting For Your Business Site?
Free web hosting is a natural thing to consider for the business that’s putting up its first website. It’s an especially sensible thing to contemplate if you want to test whether having an online presence will even help your business. However, before committing to that option, you should be aware that free web hosting has only one benefit: it’s free. Going the free route often means having to cope with the following problems:
Advertisements
Free hosting platforms generate a revenue for the purposes of paying for their costs and making a profit. This is often done by placing advertisements on the web pages using their service. The business model behind this is that their free hosting will attract publishers who create content. This content then gets traffic from the search engines. The free hosting provider makes money from this traffic by placing advertisements. Often these ads are based on the topic of your web page because this increases ad revenue. Therefore it wouldn’t be that unusual to see the ad of one of your competitors on your business website.
Besides the possibility of advertisements from a competitor, ads are very distracting and compete with your content for the attention of your visitors. Many are designed to grab attention through the use of color, movement, and sound. Having advertisements that aren’t your own on your site look very unprofessional and can damage credibility.
Lack Of Control
A free hosting platform will often change their terms of service. This change may work out to your disadvantage. When it comes to rule changes, anything can happen. Because you aren’t a paying customer, their focus has little to do with keeping you with them. Since many of these platforms rely on search engine traffic, they can make draconian changes if they feel it helps with their search rankings.
Search engines such as Google are constantly modifying their algorithms. If your hosting platform feels that commercial content is hurting their search engine rankings they could ban commercial content. This means the loss of your business site. While this sounds like an extreme example, the banning of commercial content from these types of platforms has happened in the past.
Free hosting platforms are also engaged in fighting spammers and other abusers of their service. Your site can get caught in the crossfire if a terms of service change meant to fight abusers happens to adversely affect your site too.
Lack Of Customer Service
Free web hosting platforms have no customer service because they have no customers. It’s a rare thing for anyone using a web hosting service to not need assistance at some point. Whether your difficulty has to do with understanding how some particular thing is done or with a deficiency in the service itself, there won’t be anyone to call or email. You will be on your own, which means spending many hours doing research or simply making do with the problem.
While these are only three of the issues associated with free hosting platforms, they are important ones. Even if your intent is to test whether an online presence is right for your company, it wouldn’t be a good test because the advertisements and the lack of customer service would adversely affect your online test in the first place. The problems with free hosting will reduce profits and therefore will invalidate the test. In addition, the effort is an investment of your time which may go up in smoke should an unfavorable change in the hosting platform occur.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of using a paid web hosting service, please contact us.
