Domain Hosting

Are you looking to make your very own website to establish your web presence? If so, then you may have seen a lot of online ads offering you free website or domain hosting in your efforts to learn more about the process. They look tempting, don’t they? After all, nothing’s better than something that’s offered for free.

We’re here to tell you to ignore those ads entirely, and look for a paid domain hosting service instead. Yes, you may think you’re getting a great deal going with a free hosting service, but trust us, you’re going to be losing more money going with the free option than actually paying for it.

Skeptical? Good, everybody should be. But just to convince you, here are the reasons why you should shop around for a good domain provider rather than a free one.

Your free website or domain can be deleted at any time by the provider

Free domain hosting providers can close or conclude their free service at any time. This means that the website you’ve worked so hard on designing, and whose content you’ve been building up for as long as you remember, can and will be deleted off the internet without you having any say in the matter.

Of course, your free service provider may announce the closing of their free services well in advance, hopefully, giving you enough time to find a new host to move your website to.

But ask anyone else who’s managed a website and you’ll know how difficult it is to move all your website content to another server without losing any data or breaking anything in the process. This endeavor becomes even more difficult if your website has grown throughout the years.

There’s also the fact that you must deal with finding a new host in the first place, which can be challenging and stressful at the same time. For instance, some free website hosting providers may not permit the kind of content you’re hosting, which immediately means a no-go. They may also have so many limitations that it may be impossible to port over your entire website in its original form, or at the very least necessitate the removal of so much content and features that it may end up completely unrecognizable to your regular visitors.

Is all of that worth the free domain hosting? We don’t think so, and neither should you.

Your website will always be slow to load, even in fast connections

If you’re using a free domain or website hosting service, then there’s a very good chance that a lot of people are using the same service as you. Obviously, this means that your website will be sharing a server with a lot of other websites.

With so many websites housed in just one server, there’s going to be some very heavy congestion going on, which could easily result in your website being very slow to load, even on fast connections. In fact, if one of the websites you’re sharing servers with suddenly gets a huge influx of visitors, the server load will be so immense that your website may stop loading entirely.

While this may not seem like a huge problem for you, it definitely is a very significant one, as it directly impacts your visitors’ experience. In this day and age where everyone’s attention span is rapidly dwindling due to so many other sources of information and entertainment readily available, even a few seconds of waiting could have potential regulars simply clicking away from your website. There’s nothing stopping them from going to another website or choosing your competitor instead.

Your website’s URL will look unprofessional

Choosing a free domain over a paid one means that your personal website’s URL will be long, unwieldy, and hard to remember. This will obviously look very unprofessional to your potential clients and customers, and even more so when you start printing it on promotional material such as posters, flyers, and even on your own business cards.

Worse, this also opens you up to website spoofing, where cybercriminals on the internet could create a URL that looks similar to your own, mainly for misdirection or even phishing purposes.

Your website may end up having a lot of annoying pop-up ads and advertisements that you may not even be earning money from

Most free website/domain hosting services keep themselves in operation through ad revenue, usually from the many websites that they host. This means that for the entirety of your time with a free hosting service provider, your website will be featuring ads that benefit the provider – not you. That’s potential income lost to someone who doesn’t even contribute to your website, to begin with!

Let’s say that you earn your income through other means, and you’re not necessarily concerned about ad revenue. This doesn’t change the fact that your website still has ads that you have nothing to do with. These ads may feature something that’s totally unrelated to your content, or worse: something that you absolutely don’t want to see on your website, such as pornography, prohibited material, violence and gore, etc.

What’s more, these ads may even make your visitors’ browsing experience annoying and slow, as the ads may come in the form of pop-ups, auto-playing videos and other annoyances. If the previously-mentioned items don’t drive off your audience, this will.

You will have zero technical support in case of emergencies

If anything goes wrong with your free website, whether it’s an outage, a DDoS attack or even a straight-up hacking and defacing job, there’s a very good chance that you will not have a technical support team that you can rely on for help. Even if your service provider does say that they always have a customer support team ready, the massive amount of people they’re serving – being a free hosting service and all – will guarantee that it will be ages before they ever get to your request for help. In most of these cases, you’re on your own.

Conclusion:

Just because something’s for free doesn’t automatically mean it’s a good thing. Sure, it costs absolutely zero money to go with a free website or domain hosting provider, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be paying in other ways, such as your website being festooned with ads, your URL looking very unprofessional, and being left to fend for yourself when something goes wrong. Think about all the reasons we listed here and consider if putting up with these costs is worth the money you’re saving.