If you are thinking about starting a website and have looked around for a hosting provider, you probably came across many free hosting offers. While it would be nice to believe that there are actually people out there who are willing to rent out their server’s resources to you with no charge, and still do a decent job of it, sadly, that is really not the case. The only people who might want to make use of their services are those making their first site, who want to see how it all works, but if you want a reliable host that provides adequate support and cherishes their customer, you’ll need to look elsewhere. We tried to list the main reasons for staying away from similar offers.

Reasons Stay Away from Free Hosting Offers

Resources

When you sign a hosting deal, among other things, the host is responsible of providing you with certain amount of bandwidth and storage for your website. When the bandwidth that was allocated to you for a particular month expires, your site becomes inoperable, until the beginning of the next month. Free hosting providers usually only offer low-bandwidth, which is to say that if you have a more demanding, media heavy website, or if you are getting a lot of visits, your site will soon run out of bandwidth and stop working. The deal is pretty much the same with storage, as you only get the bare minimum.

Ownership

Even though the site is hosted by the provider, it should still be owned by you, right? You are building the website and filling it with content, and you should be the one calling the shots. However, these providers are not really all that observant of your proprietary rights. For one, they pretty much feel as if they have every right to do just about whatever they want with your content. That is to say that they may decide to delete some of it, or even scrape it and use it where they want. Apart from messing with your content, they also sometimes take the liberty to suffocate your website in ads, justifying this move by their need to make up for the money that they are not getting from you. This might not be such a terrible thing, but you have no control over the ads, which is to say that you can easily find your site cluttered with adult websites ads, or even ads for your competitors.

Bad Neighborhood

Another issue with these kind of hosts is that the only people who find their offer enticing are spammers who don’t mind if their hosting is not too reliable. Since most, if not all, of these providers offer shared hosting, you would be sharing your IP with blacklisted sites, which can automatically result in your site being considered untrustworthy, even if you never did something wrong.

Reliability and Customer Service

You want to know that your site won’t experience too much downtime, and that you’ll always have someone to talk to in the hosting company if you experience some problems with their service. Regular hosting providers try to offer great technical support and reliable service since they don’t want to lose customers, but free hosting providers don’t really have that kind of concerns, and that always reflects on the quality of their hosting.

About Author:

Article by Samuel Evans. Samuel is a writer and blogger for the Australian company Crucal.com. Currently exploring everything related to technology.