Free Web Hosts For Your WordPress Blog——No
The web host, quite literally, is the home to your WordPress site. And as your site’s traffic grows, we need to upgrade hosts. But it’s not not just traffic to be considered, our choice is governed by a multitude of factors. The average uptime of the host, quality of service including performance, speed and supported software, technical skills of the support, and most importantly, the cost.
Almost all beginners ask the same question when choosing a web host:
How much is thing going to cost?
Once you dive into the wonderful world of WordPress, you’ll gradually come to realize that cost of a web host, although a governing factor of human logic, isn’t the most important one.
Why? The reason is simple – as you learn more about WordPress, you’ll find that there are many factors such asautomatic core updates, DDoS protection, managed hosting, integrated CDN, and a host of others that come into play, once you enter the big league.
Free WordPress Hosting
Many web-companies offer free hosting to promote their Web hosting business. Usually they offer a limited amount of space, bandwidth and support for free. Now, if you are wondering how free WordPress hosting model works, read on. Usually web-hosting companies target more on number of clients initially and later on money. Usually they offer free hosting or super free hosting and from next year they charge usually, which actually cost nothing to hosting owners. Also, with time when you website grows, you usually need more resources and storage and then you look forward to upgrade to premium service by paying for it. Usually, free Web-hosting is not a bad idea for anyone but if you are looking to get into professional front, avoiding free web-hosting will be your best bet.
Webpages are hosted on servers, and maintaining a server can be difficult and expensive. This is why most business owners and individuals choose to use a web hosting company to host their website. There are many free WordPress hosting companies are available in the market and a quick search on “Free WordPress Webhosting companies” will give you a great list of Web hosting companies which are offering free hosting for WordPress or any other platform.
Is free hosting really free?
The goal of every company is to make a profit, and providers who offer free services, in this case hosting, have to figure out a way to recover the loss that is generated by the servers that are offered for free. They will try to sell premium hosting, domain names and other services to their free users. There are also cases, when the free hosting is offered only for trial period, and if you want to continue you will have to pay after a certain time. Even if you think you will be saving money, in the long run it can hurt your business if continue using free service. The two major issues are the reliability and security of your website.
Is free hosting reliable and secure?
Usually free hosting is offered by not so popular companies or hobbyists trying to build up a business. In most of the cases these servers are rented from big hosting companies but I met cases when someone had his servers at home. These servers probably are not built to support hundreds of accounts and thousands of connection, so the result will be slow website loading, outages, delays and a lot of other problems. If a website is hacked on the server, all other accounts can be compromised as well, so there is a big downfall in security as well. Another problem beside unreliability and security can be the guarantee issue. Some companies can vanish overnight and all your hard work and website is gone. If you don’t have a backup of your website, probably you will have to start again from scratch.
Problems with Free Web Hosts
Features and Limitation in Free Hosting
Because the server resources are limited, free hosting always has some kind of limitation: they can limit the maximum size of your website, restrict the number of pages for your site, etc. There could be a limitation to the bandwidth as well, that means, if your site reaches a certain amount of downloads, it will be shut down without any prior notice. In most of the cases only html and css files can be hosted, and images and other multimedia files have to be uploaded elsewhere. It can be very difficult to manage your files having them in multiple locations.
Forced Advertising
The first problem that you will find with free host accounts is the unwanted ads on your site. Having your site on a server, the admin of that web server can control your site and change it anytime. Some free hosting services insert banners and text links to your site, trying to recover the loss this way. It is obvious that they will take all the profit, but you will get free hosting in return. Another problem is that you don’t have control over the ads: you can wake up seeing your competitor’s ads on your site, which will drive away visitors and potential customers from you.
Frequent Overuse Notices
Sometimes there are going to be traffic spikes in your website. For example, if your link is retweeted by someone famous, or it gets popular on Reddit. Any normal shared host is going to log that as a resource overuse.
But let’s not consider that. free webhosts limit your resources in such a way that even a minor boost in traffic will fetch you an overuse notice. Repeat this a couple of times, and they might even block your account and withholdyour data until you pay a heave fine!
Hidden Costs
When a company charges for products or services that should be free, we categorize them as hidden costs. Free webhosts are filled with such twists. They might charge you for:
- Restoring backups
- Domain transfer (a very big amount)
- Raising an escalated support ticket
- Resource overuse incidents
Inexperienced Support
First of all, response to a ticket is going to be slow. There might not even be a proper support software. If you manage to cross these two hurdles, here’s the next one – support might not be able to help you with even fairly simple hosting issues. I don’t think complicated issues even come into question – you’re all alone.
Little or No Backups
Most of the times, new users are unaware of the importance of backups, which makes it a responsibility of a good hosting company to take regular backups. Every good host like BlueHost or WPEngine will take regular backups of your website and retain them up to 30 days!
The chances of a free web host taking regular backups are pretty slim. Even if they do, there’s going to be unacceptable size limitations and short backup retainment periods. As a bonus, they might even charge you for restoring a backup!
Paid Services Over Free Hosting
Having a paid hosting account will make things easier, and you can spend your time for more productive things then managing and worry about your website. On a shared hosting account there are very few limitations and comes with lots of benefits, such as: domain name, professional email address, support for multimedia, support for blog and forum, and in most of the cases 24/7 customer support to help you with any hosting related issue.
If you want to build a professional website using a site builder, iPage will do the job, if you want a WordPress blog, you may check out BlueHost. These two companies are offering reliable services at a very competitive price. You can also get a free domain name if and a lot of other features that are nonexistent in free hosting.
Poor Security
Security is one aspect which is sadly undermined by novices. But that should not excuse the hosting company. They’re supposed to be the experienced ones, right? free web hosts have really poor security countermeasures. Basic firewalls, lack of malware protection and almost zero protection against DDoS attacks leave your site vulnerable to a host of attacks.
Severe Resource Limitations
free web hosts will usually use poor or used servers and/or cramp as many users as possible into those servers. As a result, the amount of resources shared between each user is severely reduced.
For example, consider a server with 8 GB of RAM. If we stuff in 100 people in that server, each person will get roughly 80 MB of RAM. (8 x / 100). That’s pretty decent. Increase that number and you’ll start having problems.
The Hard Drive Conundrum
Server hard disks are usually more expensive than their desktop counterparts. This is because of their improved reliability, faster performance, and greater average life. Any hard disk is a degradable resource and thus has a mean life. This means that after the specified lifetime, the probability of failure of the hard disk significantly increases along with the performance degrading below acceptable levels. In short, once the specified lifetime of the hard disk is over – it should be discarded.
But that isn’t the case with free webhosts. They’ll continue to use those downtrodden hard disks (or even desktop grade hard disks), which will eventually fail… and so will all your data!
Unskilled Technicians = Longer Downtimes
Backend technicians are people who maintain the servers – everything from connecting the wires to installing OS upgrades and security. Skilled server admins are very expensive – a concept free hosts like to avoid like the plague.
Downtimes, however, are a necessary part of shared hosting business. The best of the lot have advanced software to circumvent its effect. But with free webhosts, you’ll encounter inadequate and sub-par server resources – like the hard disk issue we discussed earlier. Couple that with inexperienced technicians, and you’re in for frequent and prolonged downtimes.
Conclusion
When you planning to start a blog seriously, avoid free webhost at any cost. Use it for testing and non-serious work. If you are from a country or don’t have Credit card, PayPal or other payment accessibility, ask your parents or family members to buy a hosting account for you. You can also search for your city or country based hosting account as many of them accepts direct bank deposit payment system. If you are in India, you should check out Hostgator India, as they offer many payment options for Indians and they are considered as quality web host for WordPress.
