In the world of the digital market, everyone needs a website to run there business. Whether they are small business owners, startups, or new entrepreneurs. They are attracted to the concept of free hosting as it cuts overall costs to some extent. But, before you go about deciding, what is best for you? Open web hosting or paid web hosting? Go through the 10 points mentioned below. They will help you determine what is best for you!
Search Engine Rankings
Every business or every website owner aims to achieve a higher search engine ranking. But it is essential to keep in mind every factor that affects the ranking of the website search engine. At terms, free web hosting providers display irrelevant ads on your site that affect the growth of your website. Furthermore, free hosting platforms are also known to be used by spammers for creating dummy websites. The search engines notice all these factors, and this will surely harm your search engine rankings. The businesses which go for the paid web hosting services will never encounter these issues; they will have better search engine rankings and also reputed online visibility.
Reliability
Reliability is one of the most quaint points that make a difference between free web hosting and paid web hosting. The unpaid web hosting platforms do not provide the same uptime as the one provided by the paid web hosting companies. It is because a proper server infrastructure is required to provide excellent uptime and higher speed to websites. So if you go for a free web hosting platform, you might experience downtime to your website in some cases, or it may also be possible that a free web hosting platform might not be able to of hand the higher traffic on your site.
After all, your business is run from the accommodation of your visitors and customers. Customers may be lost due to a slow website or a website that is down at random times. Most professional paid web hosting platforms guarantee 99% uptime, which is essential for your business website
Bandwidth and Storage Space
Professional web hosting providers will provide a wide array of web hosting packages that have a different form of bandwidth and storage space. You can select according to the requirements of your website. But when it comes to unpaid web hosting companies, minimal bandwidth and storage space are provided. A complete infrastructure working in the backend is needed to provide customers with sufficient bandwidth and storage space. So, it is genuine that a good web hosting company will take charge of it. If you for a free web hosting package, everything might look good in the beginning, but as your website grows and when you need to unload or transfer video files, photos, or other media files, things will start getting difficult for you.
With limited hosting resources and with a limited amount of support for growth from the web hosting company, your website will often encounter issues like slowing down and downtime.
Customized Error Pages
With a free web hosting provider, you won’t be able to create customized error pages. Error pages are utilized by the webserver to let the visitor know that there is an error. This can happen if the visitor searches for the wrong URL of a page or search for a page that is not available on the website. If you have a free hosting account, the web hosting company’s stock error page will be displayed to the visitor, but this page will not suggest to them what they are looking for. These results the visitors will be confused, and he/she will leave your website.
But it is not in case of paid web hosting! A paid web hosting account provides you complete control over your website and your hosting account. You can customize error pages for your visitors and display them when a visitor tries to access a wrong page or page URL. If you give the direction to navigate to some other page, the visitor will not feel lost and will try to explore your website further. And this results that you won’t miss a visitor who got on your website by typing the wrong URL.
Support and Assistance
It is a fact that free hosting providers do not offer immediate relief for technical issues. Not every website owner needs to have complete technical knowledge. Therefore in the absence of timely web hosting support, you might have to deal with many professional and customer issues instead of focusing on business growth. Lack of technical support is primarily a significant issue for the websites that work with MySQL databases, Pearl scripts, and PHP. If you pay for the hosting services, every business has access to 24/7 technical support, thus making their work easier and hassle-free.
Free Is Not Free!
Free web hosting providers also need to earn. Because they also need money to run their own company! What do you think about how will a company that offers free web hosting packages earns? The answer is – through advertising!
If a free web hosting provider is not charging you for the hosting account, then they will surely place advertisements on your website. You have almost no control over the ads, which is shown on your website pages. What if a competitor’s advertisement or any other inappropriate advertisement is displayed on your website?
Along with the growing visitors, you are also building the reputation of your website, and you surely don’t want to put it at stake with the display of irrelevant ads on your site. It will never happen in a paid hosting platform as you are in complete control of your website, and you can only display what you want on your website.
Free Web Hosting Won’t Last Forever
When using a free web hosting service, you have no guarantee that the web hosting company will be there for an extended period. At some point, a free web hosting provider may also think to pack. But It is not that a paid web hosting company has not closed, a paid web hosting company may also shut down. But if you have a paid web hosting service, you will have your web hosting account through which you can download your complete website so that it can host from anywhere. You are entirely safe in a paid hosting service. It is effortless to take the backup of your website so that it can be upload to the new web hosting account, and you can restart your site, and it will be running soon.
Website Speed
Website speed is one of the essential aspects of attracting and retaining customers in today’s era! Not a single visitors like to wait for a slow website, as there are many other alternatives. If your site is hosted on a free web hosting account that does not provide enough resources to your website functions, then your website will load very slowly. If a customer or visitor tries to access something on your site, it will take a lot of time to load. So what will happen here is that you will lose your customers or visitors to a competitor who is hosted on a shared professional server, dedicated server or a VPS. Investing surplus in a paid web hosting platform will ensure a good page load speed for your website.
Website Security
We are living in a world where hacking efforts are going on, along with improvements in security techniques; Therefore, whether your website is small or large, website security is paramount importance. If you go for a free web hosting account, there are chances that the web hosting company will not be responsible for your website security. But what if your website strikes a bargain? Are you ready to lose your data and your customers due to poor website security? To safeguard your website against hacking attempts, it is necessary to choose a web hosting provider who takes complete responsibility for your website security.
Website Building
You may build your website on both – on a free web hosting platform and a paid web hosting platform also. However, in the case of an open web hosting platform, you will have to restrict yourself to the primary attributes for creating your website, and there will be limitations on how you can create an manage the work of your website. But on the other hand, a professional paid web hosting package comes with a website builder or a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc. So you can easily design your website like you want to, and the complete process of creating your website is simplified for you as there are no limitations.
Conclusion:
Free might be sound crisp and exciting to you, but think that is it useful in the long term? You work hard for your website and your ideas put in action. So isn’t it better to go for a reputed web host? You might think that you are saving a lot of money by opting for free web hosting. But the small issues with your website might get bigger with time. And you will find yourself spending more time on solving website issues rather than focusing on growing your business.
Also, read our previous blog- Discover What is VPS Hosting (A Complete Guide)
