Free Hosting

Is Free Hosting for newbies worth it? What are the pros and cons if all of a sudden your site happens to hit big time? I just wanna know everyone’s opinion with this topic. Thanks!

Free hosting usually has all sorts of restrictions and downsides. These may include adverts or pop-ups, limited configuration control (eg, not being able to use .htaccess is a common pitfall), no support for technologies like PHP or SSI, a low cap on the storage space available or bandwidth (which might hit you if you’re using it for lots of images or video clips), low speed or poor reliability/uptime.

It depends what you’re using the site for, and exactly what features your host does offer. In some cases, it can be absolutely fine. In others, you’re likely to encounter too many problems, and that will harm the credibility and/or user experience of the site.

I wouldn’t recommend free hosting for new web masters. The reliability isn’t there and the features you miss out on are not worth it. Shared hosting does not cost a lot now a days and you get stability.

A newbie who is thinking to hit it big time for his website must not get a free hosting account. Free hosting are for those newbies who wants to practice their skills and not thinking of losing his work anytime.

i agree with grannygotgoat05, shared hosting are cheap nowadays. Some even cost less than 2 dollars per month.

Well, I used free hosting and am contented about it. I subscribe a paid hosting before but they ruin my subscription and all my efforts on my blog is going to nothing…

If you want a ton of headaches… yes free hosting is the way!
Actually for advance programmers that needs testing, free is not the best option.

There are a lot of features that cannot be done in free web hosting.
Its a really really longshot if you are hoping you hit big time in free hosting or maybe I am wrong.I just didn’t hear it or read a blog yet that a person has become successful and still earning a lot in free hosting, without any headaches at all.

I use free hosting for images (for blog) only nothing else. I don’t know if it will affect on the seo…
I use free hosting in some PHP tutorial testing.

A real suggestion you can try out the hosting providers with money back guarantees to confirm their reputations. You may not expect a good service support with the free host. However, any professional website needs good service support,

There is a good hosting program Hostagtor. It costs so little and is so easy to use. It would be my best advice

I started my site off on ‘free’ hosting and then once it had built up to the point where the site looked reasonably complete I transferred it to paid hosting and arranged for the pages on the free hosting to redirect where ever possible to the new location. The ‘free’ hosting gave me enough visitors to pick up enough work from those visitors to easily pay for the hosting and once i was paying for the hosting my income from the site increased significantly so that now the paid hosting is thousands of dollars a year cheaper than the ‘free’ hosting was.

Free hosting isn’t exactly a bad idea.

But, like many suggested, it may give problems to you at times when you should have concentrated in coding. So i won’t reccomend free hosting. If you can take a cheap hosting, you are entitled to ask fro support.

As others have said, free hosting is often a false economy.

If you just want a personal or simple blog, then starting off by hosting in on Wordpress.com or Blogger should be fine - I would just make sure you buy a domain early on - this way if you decide to move the site, then you keep the visitors (you can’t move away and keep your .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com web address in the future).

Other free hosts can be more of a problem though, as they force adverts on your users, and can be unreliable.
With fully featured paid hosting available at under $5/month these days - if you want something more than a simple blog then I would seriously recommend going the paid route.

Yes, but don’t use it for any kind of stuff which is too important, back it up every week, cause free ones have no guarantee, it’s even written in there terms.

As far as I know, one of the best free hosting companies at the moment is 2freehosting they seem to have good support and offer many features that other companies ask payment for.

It is all depends on for what you are looking for free hosting, free hosting is useful for those people who are just experimenting something or for temporary usage. Most of free hosting doesn’t have features.

I wouldn’t recommend free hosting. I mean, it’s fine for like, kids on forums playing with stuff and not doing anything serious… but if you’re going to do anythign with it, shared hosting costs as little as 2$ some places. So it should be no problem to get a cheap host… and if things pick up, you can upgrade your package right there. Don’t have to transfer or anything, unless you find a better host of course.

Many webhosting providers sell their packages with 30 day money back guarantee. In my view better to purchase such packages rather than free hosting offers.
You can ask for the refund anytime within 30 days if don’t want to host your websites with them

well…when i was starting i used many free hosting services, but the best one was 000 webhost.

000webhost has many coding disabilities , It will give you errors and limitations.

I give free hosting with premium features, Just the resources are less and less space and bandwidth. I doubt you need over 200MB of space for your work? You can message me if you are interested.

Totally agree with what’s been said about ‘free’ hosts - if they are advertising themselves as a free web host you’ll either face limitations, adverts or worse!

On that note, however, a regular ‘paid’ host that is running a free hosting promotion might be different. For example, I am currently starting a creative design agency which offers web hosting in addition to our other services. We’re running a promotion which offers a small lifetime hosting package in return for a tweet! Unlike many ‘free’ hosts, however, we won’t place ads on your site or limit your use of PHP and MySQL (for example).

I grant you there are a lot of younger people who use free hosting as an aid to learning so having a place where
they can practice and perfect the skills so they will eventaully be able to charge for their work is a good thing. After all
every web designer and developer has to start somewhere…

It’s also worth mentioning that very FEW free web hosting providers continue to use forced ads as a business model
and the likes of X10 Hosting and 000Webhost provide free packages that are actually better than some paid hosts.

However to dismiss what goes on down in the bowels of free hosting as nothing serious is something I would disagree with strongly,
for the often draconian restrictions imposed by some of these hosts for free accounts in terms of storage space, bandwidth and
server functions that many on ‘pro hosting’ take for granted mean many of those ‘kids playing around’ are creating more
efficient and leaner code than ‘professional’ counterparts, on top of finding workarounds to the restrictions. So there is without
a doubt some upcoming talent and may the gods help us all if they decide to turn Black-Hat.

Of course a rant is no good without an example so take a look at the Job Hunter Project
It’s looking a bit neglected since all those involved were offered jobs as a result of creating it six months ago but the UK job scanner
is still working and a similiar site also using free web hosting has sprung up at nijol.x10.mx covering Northern Ireland Job vacancies.

It’s not about what you got, but what you can do with it and lets face it the number of bloody awful
sites out there on the Internet using paid profesional hosting far exceeds those using free ones.