If you have a small business or just a personal website or blog, you probably don’t have the big bucks to shell out for a home web server and you don’t want to pay a lot for another company to host your website for you. Although sites like HostMonster charge a relatively small fee for web hosting, some individuals and businesses get sucked into offers for free web hosting. However, you’ve heard the expression before — there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
The simple fact of the matter is that if you aren’t paying a hosting company to host your website, they will find another way to cover their costs and make some profit as well. Most likely they will do this through forced advertising. That simply means that instead of charging you a fee for hosting with them, they will post advertisements on your site that you have no control over. If you don’t mind running ads on your site in exchange for free web hosting, then this might be a good fit for you. But if you care about the way your website looks and your user experience, this is probably not the best option.
There may be no free lunch, but you also get what you pay for. Many free web hosting services will limit your access to the site, limit the size of your site, or even give you a very small bandwidth so that your site crashes if it gets too much traffic. All these can be problems if you want to be able to regularly update your website and want it to grow freely in the future.
Remote web hosting is fairly inexpensive with most of the popular web hosting services costing as little a $9 a month. This small fee gives you lots of freedom and control over your site — the kind of flexibility you’ll need if you want your website to be an online courses site or something as a music portal.