Christian blog about church website design

I have seen people asking around what exactly do they need when it comes to picking the right hosting package for their Christian website. I don’t speak here about picking one hosting provider or an other (even if personally I use IXWebHosting (click to see for yourself) for a lot of my projects), but about why you should avoid hosting your site “for free”, or what is “the price of a free hosting”.

While there are a lot of hosting providers that will give you free hosting for your site, you should avoid hosting your website on such servers, for a multitude of reasons.

First of all, ask yourself why they would offer you for free something they make money from. The reason would be publicity. Free stuff means traffic, means people finding out about yourself and about your service. This would be good for business on the long run.

1) A “free” hosting package usually has annoying ads

That is true and you admit it yourself, isn’t it? In most of the cases, free hosting means you will get advertising on your account, advertising that will pay your hosting provider money. You will probably have pop-ups, pop-unders, floating ads, etc. This way you build traffic and your hosting provider gets advertising, so probably after a short while the hosting service will get from the advertising displayed on your site more than you would normally pay for monthly hosting.

2) Bad service

Even if they seek publicity, exposure and “the buzz”, nobody will assign the best server for free hosting, let’s face it! The best servers cost money and they need to bring money in, so they will host payed hosting, sites hosted for free being assigned to some slow servers, with less resources, that will make your site to load slowly, driving your visitors away. Also, this is due to the fact that they will host so many websites on that free server that the resources will be exhausted even faster. More websites on one server means less available space, less available bandwidth, less available speed. You don’t need this, I tell you!

3) Not enough scripting and database support

This is in case you get any. Period. Usually free hosting package means HTML only, no PHP or ASP support and about databases such as MySQL, we should not speak about from the start because you won’t get any! Maybe it does not mean much to you, if you are not familiar with website technology, but scripting support enables you to have some interesting and useful scripts integrated on your site from third party providers. Database support means shopping carts, statistics, users, etc. Wouldn’t you like to have a blog on your site? Well, if you use a free hosting, then you probably won’t get this.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t speak about dedicated blogging platforms such as Blogspot.com or Wordpress.org. No, I speak about regular free website hosting that is not dedicated to hosting free blogs.

4) Customer support? What is that?

Another feature you will probably need is customer support. When you pay for something, you require support from people providing that service, but when you get it for free with a license of type “as is” you won’t be able to ask for much isn’t it? I won’t say more, you get my point.

5) Lack of reliability

This is something that you will get a lot. You try to visit your site and you will not find it, because the server will be down. Your friends will call you asking you what happened to your site, did you stop it? Because they can not find it. You didn’t stop it but you can not find it either…

This is caused by the fact that on free hosting there are a lot of people hosting untrusted sites that will probably crash at some point. The probability is high since they are so many. When the server stops, it stops for all the sites hosted there, not just for the one that caused the crush. And this means the server will stop for you too…

6) You won’t get too many tools to help you in maintaining your site

Payed hosting usually provides a lot of useful tools like statistics, file managers, ftp managers, backups, etc. All these will not be available in most of the cases. They help. Actually the reason for which they don’t provide such services is the fact that the premium packages they offer probably offers such tools so you will get one more reason to get annoyed and upgrade to a payed hosting account. Don’t you think I am right?

7) Backups.Oh, yes!

You need backups! I know I need them quite often. Everytime I make a mistake I am able to go back to yesterday’s version of the site and find what I need. This way I never lose anything. Free hosting doesn’t provide such services in most of the cases.

Third party gadgets and services

One of my friends complained to me about not being able to install Adsense on his free website because the service provider does not allow him to do this. Of course! I advised him to upgrade and get a payed but cheap hosting package to solve this problem since advertising will probably bring him enough money to pay for the hosting.

9) Watch out! Free services can stop anytime!!

That’s the worse reason out of all of them! You work so much for your website so you probably won’t be too happy to find out that due to whatever reasons your site has been deleted without further notice. I know it happened to me once and the site was perfectly fine, just that the terms of service required me to log in every 3 months. Well, I didn’t know that and when I knew it was too late for my site.

10) No domain redirection

Usually, free hosting providers don’t allow you to redirect your domain there. So, instead of having the address YourSiteName.com you will be stuck with YourSiteName.YourFreeServerName.com for life, because this serves their goal: advertising, exposure, brand building. While with your own domain your visitors won’t know where you have your site hosted, while if you also maintain their domain in your address, everybody will know. It’s again, free publicity for them!

11) Emails under your own domain name

If you have your domain name, you can create emails under that domain name, if you can not park your domain there, you can not have emails under your domain name, it is that simple, see reason 10. For example if you have the address YourSiteName.com you can have the email YourName@YourSiteName.com. Isn’t that great? Well, not with free hosting. Considering point 10, this is usually not possible with free hosting…

While these reasons are true for most of the free hosting providers, they are not true for all of them, or at least not all the reasons at the same time for all the service providers. For example, you may find free hosting without advertising or with PHP support, or with domain parking, but they will never ever offer you the same services as with payed hosting because they have no reason to do so. Payed hosting brings money. Free hosting brings less money than the first category, it is that simple.

These are only 11 reasons for which you should avoid free website hosting and go for payed one. You can find cheap hosting without any problem so, in God’s name, please avoid free hosting. It doesn’t pay on long term!

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