It usually depends on what you really need and what you want to achieve. There are advantages and disadvantages for each and everything so do both paid and as well as free web hosting have.
Free Web Hosting
Advantages:
- The most obvious benefit is that it’s free.
- You can use your free web space to practice programming. Not many, but there are some free web hosting plans that support a programming language such as PHP, ASP, CGI/Perl, Coldfusion or JSP.
- A free web hosting plan is good for creating a personal website.
Disadvantages:
- A free web hosts usually place their banner and text ads on your website.
- With a large number of free hosts, your website is placed in a sub-domain or a folder (www.yourwebsite.freehosting.com or www.freehosting.com/yourwebsite) which usually results in poor search engine rankings.
- As they are offering free hosting, lots of free web hosts are not able to offer 24/7 or any support.
- Very few free web hosts offer a control panel with their plans.
- Another drawback with free web hosts is many don’t allow FTP access which is an problem if you have many files to upload.
- Free web hosting plans does not offer much disk space or data transfer. This could be a problem if you have a lot of bigger files or if your website generates a lot of traffic.
Advantages:
- With paid hosting, you will now have any unwanted text or banner ads placed on your website.
- Your website will not be placed in a sub-domain or folder. You will have your own domain name (yourwebsite.com) which will not only have better search engine rankings but it will also looks more professional.
- Most paid web hosts offer 24/7 support.
- Many paid web hosting plans comes with a control panel such as cPanel, Vdeck, Plesk or Ensim which is having the features like web stats, the ability to password protect directories, and you can also create web based email accounts.
- Most paid web hosts offer FTP access.
- Usually, all the paid web hosting plans support lots of programming languages like PHP, ASP, CGI/Perl, Coldfusion and JSP.
- With the more disk space and data transfer you get with paid hosting, you can add more files to your website and it is having the ability to handle more traffic.
Disadvantages:
- The only disadvantage here is that it’s not free.
Posted under Web hosting
This post was written by on December 23, 2009
I’ve been looking into web hosting and I must say this article was very informative and helpful. Thanks.