The remaining free and cheap web hosting service providers started offering paid web hosting services with offered extra features, as a value added services on top of their existing everyday services. Although you can get your website online, it will only be a presence with no depth. Often, these providers requires their name to be named in your domain. On the other hand, there are good free providers out there that has fewer limitations that allow you to exploit more on your website design. We just need to find out which one is the better web hosting provider.

The limitations with a free web hosting are the space, bandwidth each month and no linking for files. They also post all sort of advertisement onto website. Worst off all, there is no guarantee about the uptime of your website. Some free web hosting does provide control panel with FTP for you to transfer files as well as the use of scripting languages. Other may also provide guestbook feature to your website.

For those free web hosting that allows instant activation, it usually provides very little storage space. You will also have limited bandwidth and many other limitations. There is also the possibility of being spammed. So the better choice is to go for a approved activation which need validation to confirm your hosting. With this approved activation, you will get more storage space, bandwidth. The validation process will mean you’re your website will not be spammed.

If you are looking to have a forum- like website, free web hosting companies will usually require you to have a certain amount of posting before they offer you the free web hosting. This is like a point-based hosting. Every post that is posted, you gain one point which can be use for you to get your free web hosting.

Free web hosting does not allow much image on your website because they will use that space to place advertisement. This is somewhat frustrating because there is a limit to what you want to show on your website. However, being the fact that it is a free web hosting, we can’t really expect it to perform for us like a paid hosting. Therefore, it is all in our choice. To go for a free web hosting or to find a proper paid hosting for our website.

So why don’t you spent a little bit for a web hosting as you can get lots more advantages. You would be able to host your own domain. And if even you decide to change your web hosting provider eventually, you would be able to easily transfer your domain to your new provider and do not lose the traffic that you already have. A lot paid hosting providers also have 24/7 available support through live chat or email and they also often provide toll-free numbers for assistance. They also offer sufficient space and bandwidth, as well as standard features like MySQL and PHP. The only disadvantage is that paid hosting costs money.

Here is some important things you should take consideration when choosing free web hosting services.

1) Trustability
For the first reason, I’m inventing my own word! Trust in the provider is very important though because your privacy is of importance to you. The last thing you want is to have all your information sold to mortgage companies or something.

2) Storage
This one is important. Storage is important, especially if you want images on your free website. Many free hosting services are free for the first 10mb and then start billing you in order to get more storage. Find a host that has at least 50mb of storage so that you don’t risk running out

3) Bandwidth
This is where lots of free hosts fall down. They only offer small amounts of bandwidth, and then once you reach it, they suspend your account. If this happens, often you need to pay for more bandwidth, or wait until the month is out in order to get your account functioning again. If this happens in some cases you can email them and ask for more and they might grant you some more, but is it worth the risk of website downtime?

4) Ads
It’s a free service and the provider needs to make the income to pay the servers and maintenance somehow, so ads are expected. Lots of free hosts though go overboard with Popups and float-ins, as well as banner ads and plenty more. Try and find a free hosting provider that has non obtrusive advertising (NO Popups, visitors hate that!)

5) Functionality and Uptime
Without user-friendly functionality, you could struggle to get your pages looking the way you want them to look. Try and find a service provider that offers easy editing and also has safe, reliable servers and maintenance, otherwise you may risk your website being up and down throughout the day!

There’re hundreds, maybe thousands if you count non-english sites we haven’t found yet, and hundreds of various free web hosting companies. Yes, you don’t have to pay for any disk space with these companies, but you still have to put in countless hours setting up your websites only to discover that your trusted free host “suddenly” disappeared, or their server isn’t performing the way you wanted it to be. Then what?

You’re back to square one, going through the list of free hosts and having to move your domain/site as well as the valuable traffic you’ve built to a new site and start all over again. Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made. Nothing is free. Well, it could be if you do the work and put in time to research before you sign up and when you do be sure to factor in the following key issues when you choose your free hosting company.