Is Free Hosting an Option for You?

If you want to set up a personal home page, if you have an organization with a very limited budget for advertising and public relations or if you are just starting up a business, free hosting might be an option for you.

However, we would like to warn you that from our experience, free hosts will always have restrictions of some kind and many of those offering hosting without advertising go out of business sooner or later or realize they do have to put advertising on your site after all.

If you want to look for a free host anyway, we would recommend you to check the following.

Will you have advertising on your site in the form of a pop up or banner?
Do you have to open promotional emails?
Will they host your domain name? If not, a redirection, like cjb.net could be an alternative.
Do they allow cgi scripts to run from their server? If not, remotely hosted scripts can be an alternative, but they often carry banner ads as well.
Do they allow business sites?
What are the possibilities to upload your files? FTP, Frontpage or web based file manager?
If you get a free domain, can you at any time stop the agreement and host your domain elsewhere?

Make sure that if you use a free host, you use either a domain name or a redirection address. This way, if you ever want to or have to change hosts, you can keep your website address.

Conclusion:

If you need a reliable host and you have to convey a professional image, we advise you to go for paid hosting. It might save you time and frustration in the long run.

However, if you cannot afford paid hosting, you might as well start out with free hosting and take it from there.