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Free Web Hosts: Too Good To Be True?

Description: Free web hosting sounds like an unbeatable deal - after all, why pay for web hosting if you don't need to? Read on to find out why paying for your hosting might be the best decision you could ever make.

To anyone new to the idea of having their own website, free hosting must sound like a dream come true. Someone is letting you get your own site online and you don't have to pay a cent to do it.

But is free hosting really as good as it sounds?

There are undoubtedly some people who find that free hosting services give them all they need. But these people are truthfully few and far between. For the majority of people who want to have a decent sized, well constructed website which is constantly available, paid for web hosting is the only route to take.

The main problem with free web hosting is that it comes complete with a whole host of limitations. The web host will usually let you have a certain amount of web space for free - sometimes just a page, sometimes a whole site - that you can do a certain number of things with.

But if you want to sell goods from your site you won't find such things as secure servers or shopping carts to make the experience a safe one. It's also likely that you will have to put up with having adverts all over your website - courtesy of the web host - that you can only get rid of if you pay for the privilege of doing so.

That's not to say that free web hosting doesn't have its place. For people that are completely new to the world of websites - and who are considering the idea of having a site themselves - it can give them the chance to get a good grounding in how to build web pages and use html.

The other main problem in using a free host however is in the fact that you don't usually get your own domain name. Instead you will get a sub-domain. You can still choose your portion of the name, but the name of the web host will also appear in the web address that everyone will see. This makes free web hosting very unattractive for businesses and anyone else trying to become known online.

The main rule to remember if you are considering taking advantage of free web hosting is to ask yourself whether you are really happy giving people a long web address that also includes the name of the free web host. If you aren't, then you need to give them a wide berth and stick with a paid hosting provider instead.

Most people who are new to website building tend to be attracted by the idea of free web hosting in the beginning, and give it a go to see what it's actually like. After a while though they realize that it doesn't offer them all the features they would like, and they opt for the paid version instead.