Difference between free and paid hosting?

Sorry for off topic, but i need get get some solution for my web site hosting. I have done a little research about it.
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Here is my question to you:

  1. What is difference between free and paid hosting?
  2. Are those companies known well and are they reliable?

Thank you and hope to hear some of your reviews.

And with that repetition, I’ll close this FLUFFy thread.

Regards,

DK

Hi Guys,

Never go for free.There is always problem of advertise in free hosting,

Thanks,
Deniel.

host1free is a relatively new host. They have a paid hosting brand, host1plus.com. I seem to recall seeing representatives of theirs misusing forums and not respecting advertising rules.

Justhost is a budget host, and one of the hosts that have managed quite some growth in a short amount of time, as a result of really clever - and sometimes questionable - marketing (they used to own sites such as besthosts2008.com).

That being said there should be lots of reviews to be found about them on specialized sites and forums.

Hosting is like anything, you get what you pay for. If a Service Level Agreement and accountability is important it’s worthwhile to go with a paid host. There are many reliable providers that offer shared hosting account for under $10 per month.

  1. What is difference between free and paid hosting?
    Ans. Quality :wink:

I disagree- the quality can be the same. The only real difference between free and paid hosting is how you pay for it and the fact that free hosting is generally the more expensive option based on what you get and what you have to pay for it.

I am hosting my site at Justhost. While performance isn’t superb, it is decent for the price you pay. I came from Hostgator to Justhost, mostly due to the latter being cheaper. I don’t notice any significance in terms of performance. So far there isn’t any major drama after 5 months at Justhost. Compared to free hosting, I would rather go for a budget host like Justhost. You get tech support and data guarantee at least.

I think all free hosts have that no fsockopen thingy rule. Which is a pain as it allows your site scripts to talk to server clients like email/smpt. If you’re hosting a forum on a free host people registering won’t be receiving any confirmation emails.

It’s people abusing fsockopen with their spam emails and what not that you should thank.
It’s a rite pain for people who want to build genuine sites!

Well those people should be using paid hosting - it should work out cheaper for them.

I think the choice should depend on the kind of the web site you have. If you have business web hosting site you need to think about paid web hosting only.

Yeah, I agree with you on that.

In the past I’ve had clients ask me to install Wordpress on there sites. Great, nice and easy. It’s only when I discover they’re using a free host that I curse the spammers. Time is money. :o

For anyone who wants wordpress on free hosting there is wordpress.com where there is no need to do any setting up at all.

Yes, but at wordpress.com, you can’t use your own themes. They force you to use their not so attractive themes and then only let you edit the CSS. You can’t touch the PHP. You can’t upload plugins either. You’re better off using Blogger as people are now converting Wordpress templates in to Blogger templates.

I didn’t know that since I have only ever used WordPress on paid hosting where it works out hundreds of dollars a year cheaper for me than having a site on free hosting would cost.

The difference is simple. One is paid for by you. The other is paid for by someone else.

As for who pays for the other one, the answer varies widely. Here are the most common:

  1. Advertisers
    These are businesses which pay to have their products or services visible to a wider audience, through display on your website, or the hosting provider’s website.

  2. Affiliates
    This is similar to advertising, except payment is made after a sale or specific action is done. Often, free hosts earn affiliate commissions by referring their users to paid hosting providers, who may pay as much as $125 per person who signs up. Be careful - since obviously a service wouldn’t be able to make any referral commission in this way if it met everyone’s needs.

  3. The Management
    There are two cases. Either, the ‘company’ was started with the hopes to make massive profits really quickly because advertisers would somehow ‘pour’ money into it. (Stay away - these fizzle out usually 3 months to a year.) Or the administration is really just interested in helping people, and put forth their own money to do so.

  4. Paid Clients
    In this case, the service is sub-par, and paid for when clients want extra features. Services of this nature go out of their way to limit you.

  5. Sale Of Complimentary Services
    For example, the host might sell domain names, resellers, VPSes, or dedicated servers on the side. This can work quite effectively, and since these are unrelated services, you can still expect nothing is done to deliberately limit client success.

  6. Donations
    It’s a different concept. Some hosts have clients so dedicated to helping them succeed that they get regular donations from them.

There’s the real difference, broken down. The big question to ask is why.

Whether you agree or not, you’ll hardly find a free hosting provider offering you the quality of service you can get a paid hosting provider (this also depends on the paid hosting provider you choose though :)).

If you have got the money, go for paid hosting. In my experience HostGator and Bluehost are the best hosts available.

If you lack the funds you could get free hosting. They are not that bad. My friend recently started his own hosting site, which offers decent free hosting. I actually use MyStoreHosting.Co.CC for my site

I believe service quality depends on the web hosting company whatever it provides free or paid hosting. I’m sure you will be able to find a lot web hosting companies which provide poor paid hosting service and some free web hosting companies which provide quality free :cool:web hosting services.

never go free!! u get what u paid for –> NOTHING!