If you've been researching your options for web hosting, it's extremely likely that you've run across the idea of "free web hosting." Such "free" hosting for websites is offered by many companies. This "free" website hosting actually seems to be fairly freely available; in fact, the various suppliers of it appear to be fighting for clients, in contrast to most other "free" items, for which you generally have to struggle. There are tons of paid web hosting providers in addition to the free hosting possibilities.
Given this situation, you might be left wondering why anyone would want to pay for web hosting when it looks like so many companies are willing to do so. It doesn't seem rational to pay for something when they can have it for free, at least initially. Nonetheless, there are a number of compelling reasons why people opt to pay for website hosting services even while free web hosting is accessible.
One disadvantage of "free" hosting is that you frequently have to put up with advertisements that are placed on your website by the businesses that are giving you the service. Making this compromise is particularly challenging for some of us. As you may have already learned, there are no free meals in our world. Yet, it is the cost associated with the "free" service. It's true that you don't pay the companies directly for the service, but they still make a lot of money off of the agreement by using your website and the traffic it brings for advertising.
For instance, if your website is only a side project, this isn't necessarily important. But you are aware that the advertisements would ultimately give the website an unprofessional appearance if it were a commercial one. Worse yet, some of the advertisements may substantially undermine your strategic objectives. When you take into account issues like these, you abruptly realise that paying for website hosting makes sense even when a comparable service is offered for free.
In addition, most of these free web hosting businesses have agreements in place that make it so you don't actually own the name they give you. In fact, a lot of them just give you a "sub-domain," as it were. Hence, even if you choose to switch hosts, you are unable to migrate the website. This effectively locks you in, which might be a significant restriction. The website's content might be transferred to a new website you host, but you would forfeit the domain name (and it may be quite a while before the search engines come to trust your domain well enough to rank it highly).
The search engines preserve their indexes long after websites are deleted, so after you make the switch, they're likely to see the content on your website as "duplicate content" (regardless of the fact that you deleted the "free hosted website"). Your new website would never rank if you had what the search engines perceived to be duplicate content. In other words, once you begin using a free web hosting service, you are practically locked in—at least for the duration of the website you are hosting using the free service.
Furthermore, you learn that free website hosting places several restrictions on you. The majority of these free hosting services have a tendency to give you far too little hosting space and bandwidth. Most of the time, these systems do not allow you to build sub-domains. There are numerous adjustments that you might not be able to make. When you take all of this into account, it becomes clear why paying for site hosting—which doesn't cost much anyway—would be preferable.
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