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The Downside of Free Web Hosting By Russ Mate When looking for a web host you'll come across free web hosts that don't charge you anything for hosting your website and others that charge a fee for hosting. This article will explore the downside of using a free small business web hosting company. Many free web hosting companies will place advertising on your website, usually in the form of a banner ad and sometimes text ads, or in some cases, both types of ads. You might at first think this isn't too bad - but what you need to realize is that those ads being served up could contain your competitors advertising message. That's one of the things that are out of your control when you use a free small business web hosting company. With a free web hosting plan you're not going to get the level of support you would get with a paid web hosting plan. You'll even be lucky if there is email support. Most likely, you're going to have to rely on a support FAQ page. So when you're site goes down for some unknown reason, you may find it impossible to get help. On a free web hosting plan you may experience a large amount of downtime. Why? Because in all likelihood the server that hosts your website is probably hosting 5000 or more sites. All competing for the same resources. Since you're not paying for the service, why should the free web hosting company care if your site goes down 25% of the down? Most free web hosts limit the type of files you can use. Not too many free web hosting companies allow their customers to upload MP3's and other bandwidth intensive files. If you need a large amount of storage you'll probably have to go with a paid web hosting plan. The majority of free web hosts don't offer much storage. Another drawback to using a free web hosting plan is that you may be forced to use a subdomain of your web host - for example: www.thetopfreehost.com/free/4576/sites/mysite - instead of your own shorter and easier to remember domain name. When choosing a web host, keep in mind that when you go with a free web host, you 're getting exactly what you're paying for.
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