Free web hosting service
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As the name suggests, free website hosting is a free non-paid web hosting service, usually supports forced ads on subscriber's website for earning revenue. Free web-hosting that does not make use of advertising also exists; these often come with some limits on usage. Free web hosts will usually provide a subdomain (yoursite.example.com) or a directory (www.example.com/~yourname). In contrast, paid web hosts will usually provide a second-level domain along with the hosting (www.yourname.com). Many free hosts do allow use of separately-purchased domains. Rarely, a free host may also operate as a domain name registrar. Many host provide template builders to make creating your website easier. There are also some free domain companies which may provide free third level domain names free with DNS and other facilities.
Some of such popular free web hosts include Blogger and Wordpress. When you make your websites with these free website hosting services, your website gets such name as yoursite.blogspot.com and yoursite.wordpress.com. But most of the free hosting providers are not considered much reliable
Benefits of Free Website Hosting
There is this single biggest advantage of free website hosting and that is - it comes free without any cost. Now if you are amazed at why these free web hosting companies let you make a website free of cost then you may rest assured that they do not make any loss in this business. When you make your free website with them, they use your websites to place advertisements, banners and other forms of advertising media to earn revenue. Sometimes, the revenue from advertisement is shared with the owner of the website and sometimes it’s not. For example, when you get free web hosting from blogger and if you use their AdSense service, you get a share in the revenue generated from the advertisements that they place on your websites. On the other hand, when you make a free website using wordpress, you do not have any control on the placement or revenue generated from your free hosted website. The situation is altogether different when you get website hosted through paid web hosting service. You have full control over your website and it’s your decision whether you want to place advertisements on your site or not and if yes then the whole of the revenue generated from the website advertisement banners come to you only. There are many other differences between free and paid web hosting services.
Differences between Free and Paid Web Hosting
Here are some major differences between free and paid website hosting services. It will give you a better understanding about what is free web hosting service and whether it’s worth to opt for such free hosting for websites?
Advertisements on your website are controlled by the web hosting company that provides you with the free web hosting. It can use pop-ups, banners or any other advertisement on your site on which you do not have control. If also you have partial control, you may only decide what size of banner would be displayed where on your site. You won’t have control over what advertisement you will show on the website. On the contrary, when you avail paid web hosting, you have full control over your website and no outsider can decide anything for it.
Customer support is missing for free website hosting. Something which comes free cannot be asked to come with value added services. If something goes wrong with your website, there’s no customer support for websites made with free hosting. On the other hand, paid web hosting services not only give technical support to the customers but they also provide them with help guides, tutorials etc.
Low bandwidth and lesser data transfer capacity makes free website hosting vulnerable to greater downtime whereas paid website hosting gives you optimum bandwidth and data transfer for maximum uptime. You also can’t upload more images or videos when using free web hosting service as you don’t get enough disk space.
Terms of service
As part of the terms of service, many web hosts do not allow hacking material and pornography on their server, as well as scripts that harm servers; most web hosts also disallow the use of IRC servers.
File hosting on free webhosts
Many free web hosting services discourage the use of their free web hosting services for file or image hosting in which no web page is established, or setup resulting in the use of bandwidth due to hot linking of files with no revenue gain to the service provider in the case of advertising supported services. As a result, hot linking or remote linking or inclusion of many image, media and download file formats is disabled or not permitted on many free web hosting services.
Other common limitations on file hosting limits on free hosts are limits on file size; for example a free web host may not allow the upload of files larger than 5 MB. Some may have restrictions concerning certain file types such as programs or large media files such as MP3s. Certain hosts simply have a limit on the amount you can upload to their servers, e.g. 1 Gigabyte. Many free web hosts also require that space be used to host an actual live website, and not be used for the sole purpose of storing files. This has resulted in the growth of other free hosting services dedicated to specific types of data, such as image hosting, video hosting, and general file hosting services which permit remote sharing and hot linking of files and larger file formats.
See also
References
Free Web-Hosting and 5 Best Free Web-hosting Providers