How Free Web Hosting Can Still Cost You Money
How Free Web Hosting Can Still Cost You Money

To do business online, there should be an online persona... or an address in the digital realm. That is a website. And every website of every business has to be hosted somewhere. For the business to grow online, the website should be always active or online, immersive, and engaging to the visitors. They should have a comfortable experience and should be satisfied with the site’s performance. All this emphasizes the importance of web hosting. 

Web hosting is a highly competitive field with many types of services catering to all kinds of business needs. There are many providers in the web hosting Dubai industry offering free hosting services. Their offers may sound well and good but the phrase ‘nothing comes for free’ applies here too. There’s always a catch even in a free hosting solution. 

So it isn’t really free?

The purpose of every business is to make profit. Web hosting is also a business. Obviously, giving away free hosting packages won’t yield profit to the hosting provider. They would need an alternative to make money if they are providing free hosting packages. 

Some companies offer free web hosting as an enticing bonus for availing their domain registration services. This is quite common as domain registration UAE is also a competitive sector. Other companies provide free web hosting as a trial offer i.e. they would charge the service after a specified trial period.

These are commonly practiced ways of making money with web hosting services by enticing users. The bottom-line is that they aren’t ‘truly free’. 

Let’s get into the details.

Reliability issues

A few free hosting services are actually good like they claim to be. But many aren’t. Some of them might be the idea of hobbyists or unsuccessful entrepreneurs who are starting again with minimum investment to get customers. Most of these operations are small in scale that makes them unreliable when it comes to getting consistent and continued service. 

In addition, websites hosted on services that aren’t first rate are prone to power outages, frequent downtimes, and other technical issues. No matter how popular the hosting provider is, without proper management of their services, they’d eventually fall down the ladder. This spells doom for website owners who have their website hosted on such servers. A paid web hosting company generally tends to be more stable and reliable. 

Advertising through websites

Another inconvenience a website owner may experience from a free hosting solution. The hosting company would be using ads as a money-making alternative while giving away free hosting services. They will be inserting ads on the hosted webpages to generate income for themselves. The website owner will get nothing out of it except a server hosting the site for free. They wouldn’t have control over the ads or where they are placed either in most cases. 

Limited services

Free hosting packages generally tend to have limited resources and thus offer only limited services. There could even be caps on the number of webpages a hosted website can have or restrictions to adding multimedia options. This affects the growth of the business and the search engine ranking of the website. 

Paid services, on the other hand, generally offer services like a separate corporate blog, design templates, multimedia support, live 24/7 technical support etc. 

An example

A good one would be WordPress - one of the most popular free hosting services in the digital world. Not that their service is bad, but their free hosting package does have feature limitations. Their free hosting package only comes with 3 GB of space and lacks custom plugins. To get the features, premium packages can be purchased - expanded storage space, premium design themes, control over ads displayed on the website etc. 

However, the free package is ideal if the website owner doesn’t require a lot of websites and is planning to start small with a small website. A larger website with more multimedia support demands significantly more money. 

Conclusion

If the business is on a tight budget and is planning to start with a small website, a free hosting service on a shared server would be ideal. However, it will be missing out on ad revenue, will have reduced productivity, and experience pitfalls in the overall growth rate. In the long run, it’s better to go with a paid hosting service from a reputed web hosting company.