8+ Drawbacks to Free Web Hosting

Published by John Hoff on 04 Feb 2008 at 09:04 pm

8+ Drawbacks to Free Web Hosting

Being that I own a web hosting company, I frequently surf through online forums replying to people’s hosting questions. Of all the questions I answer, I see one that appears over and over again:

What are the drawbacks of free web hosting?

1. Bottlenecks

Free hosting accounts typically are packed onto 1 server with lots of other free hosting accounts. This clog of websites severely slows down the server with each one fighting for CPU time. Results: Your site may work slow and go offline from time to time.

2. Low Bandwidth and Limited Disk Space

You usually get 1-3GB of bandwidth with free hosting accounts. This translates to a site designed for very little traffic coming to it. If there is a lot of traffic coming to it (or another on your sever) your site may go down. Also, disk space is usually measured in megabytes (50-100mb). That’s basically enough space for a few pics and some text.

3. Lack Of Tools

Free hosting accounts are limited with the tools you are provided with and can use. Many don’t even allow FTP capabilities (which I could not live without). You usually won’t have the ability to run PHP scripts or have a database which translates to no blog, no forum, no good “contact me” form, etc. on your site.

4. Ads

You usually have to display banner ads on your site. Nothing is better than creating a nice website for yourself and flashing annoying banner ads at your visitors!

5. Little Support

You usually have to wait extended periods of time for any customer service help. Paid customers get first help.

6. No Personalized Domain Name

Usually you are not able to obtain your own domain name (e.g. no www.my-site.com). You are forced to use either a subdomain of your host or a directory (e.g. www.geocities.com/my-site). This translates to bad SEO (search engine optimization) because it’s geocities that’s getting indexed, not your own personal site.

7. Bad SEO (search engine optimization)

You may have a hard time getting search engines to index your site well.

8. No Personalized Email

Many free hosting accounts don’t give you an email account. So no “john_doe@my-site.com”

*Bonus Tip #1 (Lost Contacts) - Imagine you decided to save less than $100 a year to go with free web hosting. Then one day a year later you realize that you have outgrown your free account and now it’s time to upgrade to a normal hosting account.

Oops . . . guess what?

For that entire year you spent attracting visitors, customers, and friends who have all bookmarked your website, it’s all lost. 80-90% of them will lose contact with you once you change domain names.

*Bonus Tip #2 (Undoing Your SEO) - For those of you who try to build a site that gets indexed well by Yahoo and Google, one of the most important things you can do is attract incoming links to your website.

Imagine you spend a year or so networking online and people link to you. This will help search engines find your website better.

The day you decide to switch to a real hosting account, you’ll lose all those incoming links to your website you spent a year attracting.

You have to start all over again.

Does free web hosting still feel attractive?

Share And Enjoy

Web Development

9 Comments

9 Responses to “8+ Drawbacks to Free Web Hosting”

CatherineL
on 08 Feb 2008 at 12:16 pm #
Hi John - free hosting is bad news isn’t it. I had a website in the 90’s and i was using a free host. I wasn’t supposed to sell things from the site but I did. It was doing really well - but there wasn’t a lot of competition then.

If I’d not packed it in, I’d have had to move over to a paid host at some point and I would probably have had a lot of catching up to do with competitors. It just isn’t a wise move, to use a free host. Especially not for a business.
John Hoff
on 08 Feb 2008 at 12:43 pm #
Hello Catherine, thanks for stopping by. I love your site.

I agree. When digging through forums asking about web hosting, nearly every other person is asking about free web hosting. Hosting isn’t that expensive to begin with so why even bother. As a business, free hosting just isn’t an option.

As for paid hosting companies, I’d advise people to watch out when using their own house-written web design program. For example, Yahoo! Web Hosting comes with Yahoo!’s SiteBuilder. It’s pretty easy to use but if you design your site using it, FORGET transferring your site to another web host if you decide to make the move. Their SiteBuilder codes everything for you which is really difficult to edit without the use of their SiteBuilder program.

And wow . . . getting into online business in the 90’s would have been great.
Ian Denny
on 08 Feb 2008 at 1:23 pm #
Sorry - had to visit when I saw your comment on Cath’s blog. Mainly because I do not believe in free hosting. You get what you pay for.

Admitedly, I haven’t dug through your blog yet to discover where you’re from. And why I would want to check may not be immediately obvious.

But one of the first few things I always wanted to know when recommending a hosting company to our clients were:

1) Are they human? And I mean that with the greatest respect. Will they answer the phone and take an interest in our clients’ challenge

2) Do they care? Myself and my colleagues live in a twilight world between geekdom and reality. We’re kind of translators. And we know enough to know that some geeky types do not speak “earth”. they wonder why the world wasn’t born with IP address knowledge in their DNA. So they have to demonstrate that they emerged from their darkened “basement server room” to interact with humanity and demonstrate human traits

3) Would you be the type of people we’d have a beer with? If you are, then when we have a joint challenge, we’re on the same wavelength. We’ll help each other out with a common client and their needs in mind rather than a needless blame game.

That’s why chose someone not quite local, but someone we knew could help us and therefore our clients out when needed.

And that aint free. You have to pay for it. You have to pay for real people to be sat there when you need them. Not the biggest and baddest bandwidth necessarily - an amazing number of small businesses don’t need it!

They need their email. They need their infrequently visited sites to sit somewhere.

They need reliability.

I say all this because I warmed to your comment on Cath’s blog. I spoke to our hosting company today. They’d had a client of ours contact them direct (to cut us out of a reseller fee). I don’t care about the money - but I do appreciate them pointing it out before we knew.

The “reseller” relationship is interesting. When you have a great rapport, it works both ways. We want stability and reliability because we’re an outsourced IT department for small businesses.

Our host company gives that and as a bonus we receive reseller fees which goes into a pot which covers some admin costs.

I love the way that they take care to make sure we get those fees, even when we don’t necessarily chase them.

We went bust last year, and our hosting company was fantastic. They supported us as we started up again. In fact they inspired us to give it a go again when we were really low. And it paid off for us and them, and we’re tighter as a unit than ever before - without anhy losses on either side.

So to hear from a hosting co that has a soul and speaks as humanly as you do is good.

I wish you really well with your ventures.

And recommend you keep going back to Cath’s blog - it’s fantastic.
John Hoff
on 08 Feb 2008 at 2:14 pm #
Ian, thanks for stopping by. I try getting that point across about free web hosting, but still so many people want it. They just can’t get over that word, <em>free</em>.

The human part I think is essential in any business. In the About Me section of my blog I mention a few things that frustrate me when it comes to most hosting companies. Their websites don’t speak to <em>me</em>; they all look like one big ad marketing at me. I see words saying how they help you with your business or help with marketing but do they really get involved or just pass off some software to you and let you go at it on your own?

I admit I don’t answer customer service calls or take part in tech support - there are people much more qualified than me for such things. I doubt that Donald Trump would ever take part in answering tech support if he owned a hosting company. I really truly want to help people succeed and the best part is I learn and succeed even more by doing so.

By the way, I was cracking up while I read your #2. I think I learned how to not speak in a binary language to people because of all the computer problems I have to solve for my family. Once I got that computer degree, I became the go-to guy for family computer problems.

About bandwidth and disk space, you hit on something there. I have noticed that probably the biggest thing people are concerned with when researching which hosting company they want to host their site with (aside from is it free) is how much bandwidth & disk space they can get (for next to nothing). There is so much more to it than that.
They forget to ask themselves:

- how will this hosting company help me with my website and business?
- how long does it take for tech support to reply?
- how many hosting accounts are hosted on each server (too many will slow your site down)
- do they advertise false information to get me to sign up, such as unlimited disk space? If so, what else might they do to hook me?
- what is their up time?

About the why factor to digging through my site, that’s something I’m working on right now. Why this? Why here? Why someone might want to read my blog or subscribe is more discussed on our main site, http://www.eventurebiz.com, but I’m always open to suggestions.

Thanks for your comment and kind words of wishing me success. I’d have a beer anytime! Fosters anyone?
Steve C.
on 18 Mar 2008 at 7:01 pm #
John;

You made an understatement. In fact, “8 bazillion drawbacks to free hosting” would be an

understatement. I only tried it once, and my experience was an unmitigated disaster.

Additionally, I still had to pay $35.00 for a domain registration fee; so much for “free” hosting.

To any newbie webmasters out there: If you read this, please do not even think about free

hosting. It is more trouble than it is worth, and it will probably leave you with a very (and

unfairly) negative perception of the entire industry.
John Hoff
on 18 Mar 2008 at 7:39 pm #
Steve,

I like the bazillion factor. Can we make it bazillion to the 10th power?

I’ve been answering questions on Yahoo Answers a lot lately and EVERYONE wants free web hosting and it astonishes me how many people are asking about which free web host is the best to put their “business” website up on.

Excuse me, did they say they want to host a business website on a free web hosting server?

I’ll let those who read this figure out why that might not be a good idea. If it doesn’t sound right; doesn’t feel right; it’s probably not good.

I own a web hosting company and there’s a reason I don’t offer free web hosting - it’s not a good value and paid hosting isn’t gonna break the bank.
Michelle DeRepentigny
on 10 Jun 2008 at 8:46 pm #
I know I don’t want free, but I’m not happy with the “add on” everything and limited template host I have now either. As a novice blogger, I still have great difficulty deciding which package of hosting options I need, even though you have a cool chart - I don’t understand half the options until I start picking my way through them

I’m not even sure where I saw the link to your site anymore, but I was impressed enough to mark it as a favorite and come back to try to decide which package I need, maybe I’ll figure it it out soon.

Michelle DeRepentigny’s last blog post..Athens, GA - Analyzing Neighborhoods, A Real Estate Market Trend Report
John Hoff
on 10 Jun 2008 at 9:19 pm #
Hello Michelle, thanks for commenting on my blog.

As far as blogging goes, stick with Wordpress - it’s what all the pros (and I) use. These days most hosting companies, including ours, include this program and it’s an easy install. So easy I set it up for customers who request it.

As far as your needs go, it really depends on a few factors.

I noticed you’re a Realtor/Broker. If you basically need a site that you can run a blog on, upload a few pictures, and create a basic website with MLS search, our Business Plan is fine.

I’m also always available for web development help in our Community Forum as well. If you have any specific concerns, let me know - I’ll be glad to help.

. . . and thanks for coming back to our site

When we started eVentureBiz, we decided first that we wanted our website to look and feel different than other hosting companies. The feedback has been great so far. Thank you.