Free vs Paid Hosting
This is a question which has been asked many, many times before. Smaller projects today require inexpensive hosting which will set you back about 3 and 6 dollars monthly. Owners of this paid for service have quite a few resources at their disposal which include modern technologies such as php, mysql databases and many other features. Regardless of this, we continue to see thousands of sites still offering free hosting even with the apparent defects and limitations in place, but at what cost?
Free hosting
Free hosting generally only allows users to create the simplest of sites consisting of a set of HTML-pages. Some free hosts offer the user access to built-in forums or guest books but are extremely limited on the possibilities. An example of this is, without the possibility to create user accounts, the site owner is unable to moderate the forum or guests. This leaves room for never ending spam and advertising to flood your site without your consent and without restriction. Any site control systems are a no-go.
Another drawback of free hosting is that for a content management system, or CMS to function, php and mysql are necessary, but no free hosts provide these features. Besides this, free hosts need to support their own fundings, and as such, users are often bombarded with advertising banners and pop-up windows, both of which can be of great annoyance to the persons browsing the site. While free hosting is suitable for personal web sites and non-commercial projects, serious projects and corporate sites tend to use paid for hosting.
Paid hosting
Paid hosting offers the possibility to use all modern technologies for site creation and support depending on the host and packages you choose. Whether you are a small business owner using an inexpensive hosting solution or part of a large corporate business using large portals, which have more expensive tariff schedules, both allow the use of php and mysql databases at the very least which allow the project owner to install a content management system (CMS) without which service and customization of today's web-resource is hard. Even the inexpensive hosting solution becomes a lot more attractive in comparison with the free, yet limited hosting.
Another factor to consider over the use of free hosting is that all paid hosting, even inexpensive solutions, allows the use of domain names (.com, .net, .org etc.). This makes promoting of the site significantly easier than that of free hosting. Search engine crawlers consider free hosts to be less serious than paid hosts, and as a result, free hosts are made harder to search for.
In the end, the question you should be asking yourself is, what is the purpose of my web site?
