Free Website Hosting - Is It Really Free, Or Not?

The hidden costs of free website hosting.

Running a website hosting service is not without expenses; they have equipment, bandwidth, software and payroll, just to name a few of the most obvious ones. So how can a company give away free websites? The answer is so simple that I'm sure you've already figured it out - the "free" websites really aren't free.

They only seem to be free on the surface, but if you scratch off the top layer of glitz and take a look at the grimy underside, you can easily see that their only motivation is to make money from you and your visitors.

They have to make a living like everyone else, so it's not all that surprising, but you may be wondering how can they make money from your "Free" website?

Here's how it works:

  Method 1. They Sell Advertising On Your Website.

This is the most obvious method, but if you think about it for a minute, you'll see that it is also the most damaging as well.

Big ugly banners right at the top of your pages, popups, pop-unders and even delayed pops that seem to come out of nowhere to take over a visitors browser. You may be thinking: "Well, that's not so bad, a little advertising, no problem." But what about your visitors? What impression are they getting?

You have little or no control over what banners are shown, and your visitors will blame you - not the free website company - for every popup, every tracking cookie and annoying or offensive banner.

The hidden cost of all that obnoxious advertising is the loss of your traffic. Partly from the people who won't even wait for the page to load and partly from the people who click on the banners and get whisked away - and who may very well never return.

The damage to your reputation as a webmaster may be harder to determine, but it is no less real. People will associate you with the adverts, making it that much harder to establish yourself as someone who they should be trusting and doing business with.

  Method 2. Upgrades.

These "Free" website providers know full well that sooner or later you are going to get sick and tired of all the advertising that you'll be willing to pay for an "Upgrade" to an advertisement-free website.

The problem with that is that the price is often a lot more expensive when compared to the more professional web hosting companies. Plus - many free hosts use proprietary webpage creation software - which means you can't just move your website to a better host unless you are willing to start from scratch and re-write every page.

  Method 3. Their "Free Domain Name"

With the free hosting you will get what they call a free domain name, usually something like www.yourwebsite985214.somefreehostingcompany.net, or something equally long, ugly and difficult to remember... and hard for people to type into their browsers.

That's not even a domain name - it's a sub-domain. So any inbound links that you get will be giving link popularity 'credit' to www.somefreehostingcompany.net. You may get traffic from those links, but they will not generate any link popularity for you.

They know this, and they know that sooner or later you'll figure it out, so they encourage you to buy a real domain name from them. The problem is that they will charge anywhere from 300 to 1000 percent more than a regular paid hosting company would.

There are hidden costs to having a sub-domain instead of a top-level domain too. For one thing, a lot of webmasters won't enter into a link-exchange agreement unless you have your own domain, making it harder to get those important inbound links. Many affiliate programs are the same way, they won't even take your application if you are using a free host, making it harder to make money from affiliate programs.

  Method 4. Extras and More Upgrades.

Free hosting packages are usually very limited in the web space you can occupy and the bandwidth you can use. When you reach your limit, they can (and will) shut you down until the end of the month. You can imagine what that will do to your income. 50 mega-bytes may sound like a lot to you when you are just starting out, but you'll be surprised at how fast that can get used up, especially if you add media files on your website.

So what they do is try to talk you into buying more bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transferred to and from your webspace in a month) and more webspace (the amount of 'web real estate' that your website can occupy on their servers). And you'll pay a premium price for it too.

  Other Hidden Costs

There are a few other things to take into account if you are still considering using a free website hosting service:

Few free hosts offer the features and control options that a paid host provides automatically, like integrated blogs or forums, MySQL or PHP support, eCommerce options and other features that will cost you extra - if you can use them at all on a free host.

Most free website hosting companies really are run on a shoestring, and they simply don't have the resources to buy and maintain good equipment. Nor do they often have the people, experience or knowledge base to handle emergencies, so when their outdated equipment does have a problem it will be a while before your website is back online.

Even when their equipment is working flawlessly, it is still going to be older and slower than the equipment that a regular host would use, so your pages will take longer to load. If they have a lot of websites sharing the same server that yours is on, and all of them are busy, transfer speeds will slow to a crawl.

Help and customer support is a joke. At best, you can send an email to their support department and good luck getting a reply! At worst, they offer no support at all. If you're lucky, they'll have a FAQ page or help page, maybe even a forum and a few tutorials.

And what if the free web hosting company suddenly decides that they simply cannot offer free hosting anymore, or just shuts down and disappears? Where will you be then?

Take those things into consideration and you can see why a "Free" website simply isn't. You are much better off getting a paid hosting account as soon as you can.

It's not as expensive as you may think. The cost of hosting is steadily going down, mostly due to all the competition, but also because the equipment and infrastructure is getting better and more dependable, which reduces overhead for the service providers.

To give you an idea of how the price of hosting has changed; this website (hosted by 1&1 Web Hosting), is on the same contract with two of my other websites, and it only costs $60/year for all three - this is a huge difference from my first website, (in 1999) which cost a whopping $695 for a year of hosting!

  The Bottom Line

If you intend to do anything more with your website than have a family blog and a few pictures from the summer picnic then it will actually be cheaper to buy a beginners package from a large, well established hosting company than it is to use a so-called 'Free Webhost'. (The 1&1 Beginner package is only $2.99 a month!)

At the very least they won't slap you with extra charges - and they will still be around this time next year.

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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