What Is Free Web Hosting?

Free web hosting is ongoing support of your website, making it accessible on the World Wide Web with no monthly or yearly cost. Free hosting is only one of the types of hosting available. Other types include:

• collocation web hosting service,
• dedicated hosting service,
• managed hosting service,
• reseller web hosting services,
• shared web hosting services,
• virtual dedicated server (VDS) or virtual private server (VPS),

The various types of hosting service are discussed in the article “What Is Web Hosting?”

What Are the Advantages of Free Hosting?

• Price—If you don’t yet have any web presence and hope to branch out, you may wish to start a small business site or a personal site. Free web hosting allows you to do so without committing to an ongoing revenue drain at the outset.

• Great for Web Starters—If you don’t have much experience with website design or the World Wide Web in general, and you want a chance to find your “sea legs,” a free hosting service is a great way to ease yourself into the virtual world. Some free web hosting sites are very aware of the needs of beginners, and offer page templates or online site builders can help you take care of the structure of the site, so you don’t have to become an HTML master overnight, but can focus on the content that you want to make public.

• Get On the Air Quickly—The templates and site builders also help speed the process of making your site active. Also valuable in free hosting are upload tools and web-based file managers.

• Instantly Get the Name You Want—Because many hosts of free web sites offer their free hosting services on subdomains of their own site name, so your site would look like this:

yourwebsitename.freehostingservicename.com

You have a good shot at getting exactly the name you want, whereas it may already be taken as a domain in itself. Furthermore, because it’s a subdomain, you don’t have to wait for (or even think about) issues like domain registration and domain transfers.

• You Don’t Pay for Services You Don’t Use—If your needs are simple—for example, a casual page to invite members of your college graduating class to help plan and participate in a fund-raising event for a sick classmate—the main focus is one-page with reliable availability. You don’t need fancy extras, or probably, any extras. And with free hosting, you won’t wind up paying for any, whether it’s webspace you won’t use, bandwidth you don’t need, page ranking that is unimportant to you, or other features that are extraneous to your purpose.

Two things you do want are reliable service and access to tech support if something goes wrong (for example, if you can’t access the site). Check for reviews and customer satisfaction surveys before embarking with a free hosting service.