Free hosting – advantages and disadvantages
Entrepreneurial people sooner or later have to create a personal website, forum, etc. In order for the subscribers of the network to use their projects, the sites must be placed on the server. This is done with the help of hosting services, which provides uninterrupted operation of the Internet and provides information content in the form of various programs, texts, images, reference data, tables, and so on. As a rule, free hosting and domain are part of the package for site maintenance in Saas-systems, such as uCoz, uKit and the like.
When choosing a provider, it is useful for customers to know that services can be either paid or absolutely free. There is an opinion that nobody needs anything for nothing. This statement is not entirely correct. Before deciding which service to use, you need to find out its volume, quality and determine the goals that you set for yourself.
Who is free hosting for?
Many experienced webmasters are well aware of the possibilities of free and paid hosting. Creating their sites to order, they “run in” the project first on the free version. This method of hosting is tested by the power level when solving the required tasks. If he provides everything correctly, programmers continue to use his services. If not, go to the paid form.
The second category of people who subscribe to free hosting, include novice programmers. Without spending money, they learn the skills and techniques of work without fear that they will have to pay for the mistakes.
Benefits of Free Hosting
Despite its limited capabilities, free services have their advantages. They are few, but they often satisfy requests. The main advantage is that you do not need to pay for a subscription. There are several other benefits of free hosting:
use it as a training ground when building sites;
Suitability for creating non-commercial websites, when a user category is small and the website itself is a business card or a home page without the need to expand it;
possibility of use when promoting the main site from a paid hosting, in case of creating a satellite site and filling it with a reference mass.
However, do not prematurely rejoice in this set of benefits of free hosting. He also has many disadvantages and even more than merits.
Disadvantages of free hosting
The difficulties that arise for webmasters who host sites on free hosting, are as follows:
Great instability and malfunctions. Many hosting owners simply ignore their customers. They can unreasonably carry out maintenance work for weeks or shut down the server without a good reason.
The loss of some users due to the inaccessibility of the site for the period of its disconnection.
Inability to maintain web technologies such as PHP, FTP or MySQL.
The provision of such a disk space, the amount of which does not allow the site to function properly with media files.
Insecurity due to the third level domain. They can pick it up at any time, because it does not belong to you.
Everything else has to put up with interference in the form of unwanted ads. Often, providers without demand place it on the site in the control panel.
Conclusion
Given all the negative and positive that is present in a free hosting, it is worth weighing whether it is suitable for building your web project or not. If you need a high level of technical support and a wide package of quality information, it is better to choose paid services. If many items from the list of disadvantages of free hosting do not bother you, and you are ready to ignore them, then it makes sense to stop your choice on it.
