Should you use free website hosting?

Published on 09 March 2010 by Webstrategies in Website Development

There are many companies internationally that provide free website hosting, but care should be taken when using them for the following reasons.

Performance issues– many free website hosting providers have an extremely large pool of clients, which may effect the performance of their servers.
Reliability of services – what are their uptime Vs downtime stats?
Support – can you get hold of them by phone or email if needed?
Band width and volume – be sure you will get enough bandwidth and storage volume. Know what they are offering and what the costs are.
Backup and redundancy – do the providers of free website hosting backup their web servers and databases regularly, and then can they RESTORE it if needed?
Location – where exactly are their servers? You should host your website in the country of your target market if possible. Google checks this.
Their advertising – do the providers of free website hosting require you to feature their advertising on your website anywhere?
Redirects – be sure that the free website host doesn’t use any redirects as part of their services that might prevent Google finding or indexing your website
Bad neighbourhoods – avoid any hosting company that hosts spammers or link farm websites. If their servers get blocked, you are in trouble.