Are you waiting to start a website and looking for free web hosting providers? then you are in the right place.
Free web hosting is not designed for everyone. This blog defines the importance of hosting and finds out, whether it is suitable for your websites.
What is Web hosting?
Hosting is storing and maintaining your website on the server. Your website is built over the hosting. You are just getting some space for your website to maintain on their server. This is what the web-hosting companies do. Mostly quality of the servers may differ in paid and free hosting.
Do I need web hosting?
Yes, if you are a blogger or maintaining a website. Before starting a website for blogging you must have to host for maintaining your website. Through hosting only your content will be always 24/7 live on the internet, even when you are sleeping.
Your web host is responsible for your website to be always live on the internet and available for the readers. Hosting will keep your website safe from hackers. So choose a good hosting company.
Read – Affordable and cheap Web hosting for the websites
Is all web hosting companies are the same
Definitely not. In recent years the number of free hosting has increased. Even though every hosting provider’s goal is to give good hosting to your site, they differ from their user experience and customer support.
The word user experience is more important for a blogger to turn your visitors into readers. You can’t try to get pleasant user experiences from free hosting.
Now another question, am I in need of free hosting or paid hosting. Probably free hosting is not a terrible idea, but we would not recommend you to go for free hosting. If you are on a tight budget, try to go for cheaper ones. But we need Hosting.
The wonderful news is, good hosting is also cheaper. Some hosting companies are there, which gives you a free domain when you buy their hosting. So, you need not invest in both domain and hosting.
Free hosting also has many impacts on your SEO. Free hosting directly affects your search engine optimization. The important thing is the SSL certificate. Most of the free hosting companies are not providing the SSL certificates. Without this SSL, google shows your website as harmful. It affects your readers’ engagement, SEO, brand value, and authority.
There are two types of hosting available, one is shared hosting, and the other is dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is nothing but a group of websites maintained on a single server. For a beginner blogger, shared hosting is more suitable. If you need dedicated servers, you can upgrade them later. Dedicated servers are costlier than shared hosting.
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Free hosting vs Paid hosting
Again the same thing, if you do blogging as your hobby then go for free hosting.
If you are creating some brand, that will need to get popular then go for paid hosting.
The paid hosting gives many features to explore for bloggers.
finally, you have chosen to start a blog and you have considered many things before choosing a hosting. And certain questions arise in your mind, am I need to choose free or paid hosting.
Paid hosting has more page loading speed. Speed is one of the important factors that visitors are satisfied with. When someone clicks your website, the free hosting websites load much slower than the paid hosting.
In most of the paid hosting, they store your website in SSD, which gives you better speed. If you don’t have a good page loading speed, your visitors may move to other sites. Because of this, your good content also goes unnoticed.
cons of free hosting
They limit their most of the features in free hosting. Every feature has been limited, so you can’t enjoy the feel of using that feature.
The free hosting does not have customer support, only Frequently asked questions (FAQs) available. Free hosting has only limited disk space, which is not enough for the video uploading. Sometimes it is limited to only a few images.
WordPress.com provides you free hosting and a free domain for your lifetime. But it is highly limited with features. One of the important reasons, for which WordPress famous is plugins.
But in the free version you can’t access the plugins and also themes are limited. Plugins provide an endless number of customization to your site. Without plugins, the site looks like a body without a soul.
If you are in a free domain, your domain name looks like DomainName.WordPress.com. It doesn’t look that professional. Readers will not give more attention to these types of blogs and you need more time to grab their attention.
Best reasons to choose the paid hosting
- Security
- User experience
- Tech support
- More disk space
- Higher bandwidth
- Many email accounts
- No ads
- Page speed
- SSL certificate
- Regular backups
Here you are the decider, whether you will give your readers the best user experience or giving them annoying ads. If you are choosing the paid hosting, there are plenty of hosting companies available in the market.
If you are creating a brand, then don’t think about free hosting. Hosting is not the place where you will save your money for creating a Brand. For promoting a good brand, reader engagement is more important. With an excellent user experience, only you can get the best engagement with your audience.
The paid hosting allows you to give an endless number of customization and plugins to improve your website. It nicely increases your traffic and always has more advantages in search engine optimization. And usually, the free hosting will be filled with ads. It looks annoying for your reader.
Before getting into a hosting company, choose the best reliable companies. You can also buy your domain from your hosting companies. There are some companies that provide you a free domain when you buy hosting from them. So, check and choose wisely.
Is free hosting fake
No, it’s not fake. There are many free hosting companies, which provide you decent hosting. Everyone likes free stuff, but you can’t expect excellent quality from free products. Some premium hosting companies also provide free hosting, to attract customers to their hosting.
Did you ever think about how long a company can provide you with free products? At a certain point, every company needs the profits to run their companies. So many companies are running ads on your sites to get their profit.
Most of the time the ads could be irrelevant, so it reduces the user experiences. The running ads may promote your competitor’s brands, which is the opposite and creates a poor impression with your readers.
Some free hosting companies also have many guidelines, in which you can’t change to another hosting later. If you need to transfer your hosting, you need to pay more. Try to get free hosting from some premium hosting companies, it is easy you can later upgrade to paid hosting.
If you are having a plan to upgrade your hosting later, try to get a suitable domain name. Are you thinking about which you should invest first, good domain, or good hosting?
Definitely, the answer is getting a good domain, because it can’t be changed later.
From investing only a few dollars you can get good domains. All the hosting companies provide the domain. You can get it from there.
If you find that buying a domain from hosting companies costly, then you can buy from some other cheap domain providers. Godaddy is one of the largest domain registrars in the world. Most of the time it is affordable. If you are looking for a cheap professional domain, then Name cheap is also the best choice.
Free hosting suits for whom
- The person who needs to run a testing website
- For running a non-profitable site.
- For companies showing their identity
- Personal bloggers to improve their writing skills
- Who wants to learn website designing and running a site.
- A developer for learning
- The individual person for selling limited products
- For freelancers showing their online presence.
- For an organization, setting up their online presence and showing contact details.
Few best free hosting providers
These are some of the best free hosting companies. Before buying hosting from these companies, read their rules and guidelines. So you can’t suffer later. Free hosting is not that much worse. For a beginner, these guidelines will not affect you more.
Free hosting and website builder
However, If you are not much more interested in the WordPress site and want to create your own website. Some companies providing you with the free website builder and domains. Moreover, you need not have any technical knowledge to build a site from a free website builder. Few well-known free website building providers are.
- Wix.com
- Weebly
- Zoho sites
- Google website builder
- wordpress.com
Few best-paid hosting providers
These paid hosting work well with WordPress and it offers you one-click installation on WordPress. Out of this, Bluehost and GreenGeeks are better choices, and it is recommended by the WordPress community.
If you are a beginner, then Bluehost is the best choice, because of their excellent customer support. For a beginner, customer support is one of the supportive tools for your every doubt and their chat box is always available for you. It provides you with a free SSL certificate. SiteGround is also one pioneer in the hosting world.
Bluehost also has some other advantages. When you buy their hosting, you will get a free domain and your domain buying cost could be saved. Bluehost is also one of the most trusted hosting companies among bloggers.
Conclusion
Mostly try to avoid free hosting. The paid hosting has more advantages and you can get it for less than $2/month. However, I’m not forcing you to get into paid hosting. If your reason for starting a website is as above mentioned, you can go for free hosting.
Concluding that, finally paid hosting is the better choice to feel an enjoyable user experience and customer support.
Thank you for reading the article. If you found it useful kindly share it.
Are your website is running on free web hosting or paid hosting, comment me below.