Companies that offer free web hosting services have a few obvious restrictions like limited disk space and bandwidth as well as unsatisfactory customer support. However, several webmaster newbies continue to choose these free providers because of the $0.00 fee. Unluckily, you’ll find plenty of reasons why you must stay away from free web hosting services and this article will point out some of them.
1. Most free web hosting companies place distracting banner ads as well as pop-up windows on your site. Such ads will get on the nerves of your visitors and a lot of them may even decide to leave immediately. Also, deceitful web hosts can even put viruses, malware and adware on your site which can infect the computers of your visitors.
2. Your website’s security is not guaranteed with free web hosts. Tons of websites are hacked every year; thus, you need to prioritize the security of your data. If you’re not careful, you may end up emailing your clients informing them that their private information has been thieved and may now be distributed all over the globe.
3. Free web hosting companies seldom make website backups on their servers because it can be very expensive. Thus, if their server crashes or is stolen, you will lose your entire website’s content and you can never retrieve them again. Are you willing to risk that? Moreover, some free hosts run under-the-table operations and so they don’t really care about the files of their clients.
4. Since millions of clients make use of free web hosts, expect that their servers are excessively strained to capacity. In effect, it will certainly take a very long time to load your site and will badly affect your visitors’ experience if you choose a free host.
5. Free hosts do not offer exceptional uptime rates and whenever your site is down, you’re losing a lot of prospects. If you’re left with no option but getting a free host, ensure that you choose the one with the least downtime in the past months.
6. Websites that are hosted by free companies aren’t highly valued by search engine systems, thus, it’s going to be nearly impossible to be indexed and get a high ranking on the results pages of search engines for the keywords you target.
7. Free hosts generally don't offer innovative features and web tools such as MySQL, PHP and FTP accounts as well as POP email. If you’re operating an online business, it is crucial to use these web tools.
8. There are free web hosting companies that include a tricky clause in the "terms of use" agreement which indicates that all content that are uploaded to their servers are going to be considered their own property.
Evidently, there are tons of reasons why free web hosting services must not be an option if you want to build a high quality website. Paid hosting services has numerous advantages that are worth their price, so it is a practical and prudent step to invest a bit and have a trustworthy web host on your side.
