Free Web Hosting Service Comes With A Price To Pay
Some have said that nothing in life that was free was ever worth paying for. This is more than just a sound byte or a witty saying. Many people will enter into free web hosting deals without realizing the underlying price that they have to pay as a result. That price can affect professionalism. It can limit one's abilities to give their enterprise everything it deserves. And it can certainly turn off potential clients, customers, and visitors. While not everything that is "free" should be considered a waste of time, one must still realize that for something free to truly be effective, it must have some means to an end, and that end is to generate revenue or build notoriety. Free web hosting services often keep an individual website owner from doing that under the guise of being "risk free." The reasons you should reconsider if you have affiliated yourself based solely on lack of cost are many:
Lacking Professionalism
When people visit a site that they hold to be an authority or perhaps even a place with whom they would like to do business, they get very uncomfortable with sites that are hosted for free. For one, free services do not often allow you to brand your business the way that it needs to be branded in order to be effective. Getting a standard "dot com" or "dot org" name does not happen because your handle is always tied to some representation of the company that is hosting you. You are essentially helping them to brand themselves on your hard work and talent, and that can cost you a whole lot more than you will ever save by not paying for web hosting.
Limiting Controls
While a free web hosting service may give you some powers and allow you to be operational in that you are viewable by the public, they limit the amount of bandwidth and storage that you can use, and that ultimately limits your goals as an online entrepreneur. You have to be ready to grow and then manage a steady influx of traffic, and hosting companies that offer their services for free can only take you so far.
Turning Off Clientele
If you are in business for yourself and you want your site to be a moneymaker, then the worst thing you can do is attach it to some huge web host, regardless of the fact that they are web hosting you for free. Clientele looks for authority. They require it if they are ever going to part with any of their hard earned dollars, and that simply isn't the image you are projecting if you go with a free service.
Consider these factors, and take the right step when you start your website.