Why Free Web Hosting Sucks
Free web hosting is still going strong. Just look at it online and you will get hit with a lot of solutions. They are going to lure you in with the notion of saving money. At first, it may be a good thing, but you are going to be astonished by the lies that they blatantly tell you. In recent months, there has been a big push in commercial spots on radio, print, and more. If you have been going back and forth on whether or not you should get free web hosting, you should first step back and look at a few ways that they are lying to you.
Affiliate Marketing Shackled by Free Web Hosting
The promise of free web hosting comes with the notion that you can set up any kind of website you’d like. Well, that’s excluding adult websites, right? Yes. But even more interesting is that it also means that you cannot have an affiliate marketing website. If you are working within the concepts of MLM or affiliate marketing through Clickbank, you will get banned outright. There are some hosts that will tolerate it for a short time, but if you start getting traffic to your pages, expect to lose your work. They’ll lock down your site and then give your visitors a message that you’ve violated their TOS. That not only looks unprofessional, it will cost you a lot of business collateral as a result. Some web hosting companies will not give you back your files either.
SEO Tools
The marketing efforts that you will see with free web hosting will also feature the notion of SEO. They will talk about how easy it is for your website to get found. They’ll show you an image or video of a site that is getting to the top of Google with relative ease. The truth of the matter is simple, SEO is not something that happens overnight, and it is not something that you can just click into place and see huge profits from. Optimization takes a lot of work, and some very crucial placements. If you think that you can just set up your site and click a few buttons, and get seen, you’re wrong. Furthermore, you will denote that once you sign up for free web hosting, the upsell to have “SEO” tools starts. They charge a monthly fee for this.
Huge Limits To Storage and Bandwidth
The limits that you will have with paid web hosting are not very much. Some companies will not give you any limits. Some will stop you at 100 gigs on both sides, but when it comes to free, expect nothing. For instance, you will see a lot of companies only allow you to have 50 megs. Some will drop it down to 5 megs. 5 megs! That’s not a whole lot if you are going to build a blog, or a business website that gets a lot of traffic. Traffic alone will outdo 5 megs fast. Once you go over, they will lock your site down and you’ll have to pay a premium to get 10 megs to 100 megs more. They rarely give you a lot of storage. Bandwidth is another story, you’re going to end up dealing with a lot of issues here.
The Advertisement Hustle
When it comes to free web hosting, watch out for the ads. A lot of these companies now have partnerships with Google AdSense. That means that when you set up your business site, they automatically include ads on your site. You don’t get a revenue share of this, they take it all. So you send someone to your site that’s about real estate, for instance, and they get hit with an ad from your competitors! This is something that you cannot stop. You don’t get paid from it, and it’s all included in the “free” options that they are giving you. They don’t mention this until you’ve signed up, started building your page and you publish your first solution.
It’s All Easy!
The biggest lie that you’re going to get is simple, it’s easy. Is getting free web hosting and setting up a site easy? In theory. Yes, if you want a bland, lifeless website based on templates that have been used 100 times before, yes. However, once you start wanting to add customizations, and even scripting, you will get locked out. You won’t even be allowed to rewrite the CSS or HTML for some of these templates, unless you pay the premium. There will be of course a setup fee, a maintenance fee, a onetime fee to start your domain, a registration fee, and more.
In the end, just get paid hosting. No web hosting account that is free can touch what professional hosts are providing consumers, that’s for sure.
