Free Web Sites - What’s The Catch?

You must have heard this expression a million times before…. “If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is”
Free website and web hosting companies are a classic example of this. They only appear free on the surface but their prime motivation is to make money from you. You cannot blame them for this, they have to make a living like everyone else.

So now you’re wondering “how can they make money out of me? - I’m not giving them any!”. This is how it works -

1. They sell advertising on the site you create. Once you publish your site they have banner advertising on your site that they get paid for from advertisers. You may think that is not a problem for you, but what about your visitors?. People aren’t patient enough to scroll through a load of banner adverts to get to your nicely designed content, they will just click elsewhere. Many of these free companies also put ‘pop up adverts’ on your site which are distracting for you and your visitors, as they continuously open up new windows in your browser.

2. The freewebsite company also hopes that you will get so fed up with the adverts that you pay them for ‘advert free hosting’. The price is often very expensive compared to better, more professional web hosting companies. Also, if you have lovingly created a website with their software, you will not be able to transfer your site to a cheaper hosting company anyway, so if you want advert free hosting you have zero options.

3. As part of their free hosting you will get a free domain name, usually a long ugly one eg. www.yoursite274589.freewebhostingcompany.com - who’s going to want to type that in??. This encourages you to buy a new domain name of your choice from them. The catch is they will probably charge you around $30-$40 for this. This is very expensive compared to other domain companies such as 1&1 Web Hosting who only charge around $6.

4. If you need any extras such as more web space or more bandwidth (the amount of information your visitors can download in a month), you will pay a premium for it, compared to other hosting companies. You will also find that many free companies are run on a shoe string and they don’t have enough servers to deal with all the traffic that is been generated from hosting free sites. This causes their servers to crash, which may mean that your site is not available for long periods of time. If this happens don’t even think about contacting their support, as they don’t usually have any!. If the site is being hosted for free it usually means you are not eligible for any type of support. However, if you sign up for their paid hosting (which again is very expensive!), you will get support, - are you getting the idea yet?. Its not really free is it?

The cheaper alternative to a freewebsite is to pay for it!. This may be a confusing concept but in the long run you will save money and receive more benefits by purchasing web hosting. The cost of hosting has dropped dramatically over the last few years, you can now get excellent hosting for your site for less than the price of two cups of coffee a month. Two companies - Yahoo! Web Hosting & 1&1 UK Web Hosting I actually use myself and can highly recommend them.