How to Design My Own Website

Just finished your first website? So it is the time to have a look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first question doubtless will be whether to select free or paid hosting service.

Let’s take a look at some benefits and downsides of these solutions.

Free website hosting :
( + ) It’s absolutely free. You do not want to pay for web site name.
( – ) Your URL will be something similar to username.freehost.com or freehost.com / user name. Even though you save the cost of paying for a domain, if you move your site to another supplier in the future you can lose some or all of your organic search engine traffic. There are ways around that and to fix that, but it can be convoluted depending on how your site is built out
( – ) Your supplier will doubtless include advertisements to your pages – customarily one or two banners, infrequently popup windows. If you intend to use banner exchange on your website read conscientiously their T&Cs. Some free hosts doesn’t permit it.
( – ) a large amount of free hosts can change their Terms and Conditions with little to no warning
( – ) Sometimes the free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this situation you have only two choises – pay them or loose your internet site.

Paid website hosting :
( + ) You can host your own domain. If you make a decision to change the website hosting supplier in the future, you simply transfer the domain to the new supplier and do not loose your traffic.
( + ) Most paid hosts offer twenty-four / seven support thru email or live discuss and many of them provide toll-free telephone support.
( + ) you should expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantee. In other words, you get what you pay for.
( – ) Paid hosting cost cash ) Before you make the call if select free or paid host you must answer this question : how large ambitions have I got with my website? If you’re beginning small private page for your friends consist of some *.html files then a free host will be adequate. In case you intend to run significant business site, need PHP, database and do not need adverts on the site I like to recommend to have a look for quality paid host.

But really how much is paid hosting? If you prepay a year in advance it can be as little as $4 a month! That is basically giving up, say, one Starbucks latte a month!

I honestly do not know why people would go for free webhosting when there are so many advantages to paid webhosting and yet I see questions on this all the time at the various forums and answer sites – what is the best free web host, etc..etc. I can see using a free webhost for a blog (like blogger.com or wordpress.com) but other than that, I don’t really see the benefit of free webhosting.

Check out some great webhosting companies here:
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/hostgator.html
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/hostrocket.html
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/inmotion.html
http://witchwebhost.com/likes/webhostingbuzz.html

Coming soon: more on dedicated vs reseller vs “regular” web hosting.

Tags: commercial web hosting, free web hosting, paid webhosting, web hosting