The Hidden Dangers of Hosting Your Website With Free Hosts
The hosting service you choose for your new website will impact its performance and security and either make or mar its success. When setting up your website, the ‘free hosting’ option can seem appealing. After all, who doesn’t want to save some money?
A free hosting service may promise to get your website online without spending any money. Some of these services may even offer a free domain. However, these offers are not worth the disadvantages they present.
Using a free hosting for your website is a terrible idea, and will only bring you regrets sooner or later. Below are the hidden dangers of hosting your website with free hosts:
Instability
Even though there are a few free hosting sites firmly established, the majority of them are not. Most of these free hosting sites are usually created mainly to secure advertising revenue. They don’t care about their users and can shut down their hosting service soon as the money stops coming. It means that one day your website could be existing, and the next day, it could be entirely demolished, and there’s nothing you can do.
Excessive Downtime
Truthfully, all hosting, whether paid or free, experience a little bit of downtime. However, paid hosting services will experience much less downtime compared to free hosting providers. The reason is that the servers used by free hosting sites are usually overloaded. Some of the free hosting sites can have a downtime of up to 1 hour or more. Paid hosting, on the other hand, typically provide an uptime of about 99.9%.
Lack of Quality Control
Paid hosting is expected to maintain a certain quality of product to stay in business. In order words, paid hosting sites have a lot to lose when they lose customers. Therefore, their quality control system is taken seriously as opposed to that of a free hosting service. Free hosting sites don’t have an intensive quality control process. They only create a product to make quick cash and then let it work on its own till it breaks down.
Inability to Grow
Websites are supposed to be scalable. As they become popular and get more traffic, they would require more storage space and dedicated servers. Sadly, most free hosting services offer minimal opportunity for your website to scale. The ones that allow you to upgrade would end up charging you. In some cases, the upgrade will cause you to lose all your data.
Paid web hosting, on the other hand, allows your website to grow by accommodating its server and storage needs without losing your data.
Slow Speed
Your website is guaranteed to experience slow speed because free hosting services usually overload their servers. Because of this, their users do not have enough bandwidth to move at a fast pace consistently. When you use a paid hosting site, the speed of your website will increase substantially. Paid hosting companies do not overload their servers, therefore offering a large bandwidth for every customer.
Limited Design Options
Free hosting services cannot operate with top content management systems like WordPress. Therefore, they can only accommodate limited designs and themes. It means that the aesthetics of your website will be boring because you may not get the right theme or design that appeals to your visitors. Paid hosting services, on the other hand, can operate with all types of content management systems. It leaves you with a range of visual themes you can choose and create your website.
No Security
Free hostings are popular for lack of security. Using a free hosting service leaves you susceptible to hackers, viruses, and every other harm that can affect you on the internet. Paid hosting services do everything to keep their customers’ websites safe and secure. They are aware that their customers can switch to a new hosting if they fail to provide top-notch security.
No Backup Capabilities
Understandably, hosting sites do crash whether they’re paid or free due to several reasons. But at that point, you can only hope that your hosting provider backed up your data. Sadly, most free hosting sites online don’t back up the website of their customers. On the other hand, every reputable paid hosting company provide a reliable backup system for their customers’ websites
Make It Difficult for You to Switch Hosting
Maybe you started your website with a free hosting service, and then you decide you want to switch to a paid service; these sites make it difficult for you to move any data. They can lock down any data on your website, stopping it from being moved. Your only option at that point would be to start from scratch or transfer your data manually.
Don’t Allow You to Make Money
Most websites are created to make money, and that through affiliate links and advertising. However, free hosting does not allow affiliate links and advertising on their service. Free hosting providers usually design their service to make money from ads that they place on your website; therefore, you can’t post ads and affiliate links of your own.
Come With Ugly Ads
As mentioned in the previous point, free hosting providers are really out to line their pockets. So they insert ads on their user’s website whether the customers want them or not. This isn’t a big cause for concern, but it can reduce the credibility and aesthetic of your website. When your website gets covered with excessive and unrelated ads, it can communicate unseriousness. Naturally, people will leave without gaining any useful information from your site.
From the explanation above, you can see that hosting your website with a free host only sets you up for troubles. Save yourself the stress and buy some hosting from the beginning.
