There are so many Webs hosting providers available in the market and among them, some companies offer their hosting services at free of cost to their clients; they are considered as free web hosting providers. Mostly the clients of these companies are beginners or start-ups, people who are having business on small scale and budding entrepreneurs.
Some of the free web hosting providers is here for you;
- Wix
- Yola
- Edublogs
- Freehostia
- Weebly
- com
- Xtreemhost
- Snappages
- Awardspace
- Freehostingeu
These free web hosting companies offer some basic web hosting features such as Unlimited disk space, minimum they may offer 100 MB of disk space, great uptime, some paid to host features such as MySQL, PHP, cPanel, auto-installers such as fantastico or softaculous and some standard hosting features which most professional web hosting providers offer. Some hosting companies offer SSH Access in their free web hosting plan.
Now ques. arises in your mind, how money is made by them to pay for the servers if they are not charging anything from you. So, the answer is, in this world even water is not free today so how could web hosting, yes it is not free only difference is that they are charging something else instead of the money which you may not know.
Popups and Advertisements
If you avail the services of a free web hosting provider, then in every 30 seconds your control panel or other pages may refresh and take to you a website which is having several popup and advertisements. Like this for the first time when I logged in to the company control panel then it shows 4 advertisements and popup. Here the code of ad-popup and hit counter was injected by the companies in the web pages of their client's websites which is visible once in a day as a new and unique visitor visit the site which is highly unprofessional and unacceptable.
Selling your data
If you read the terms and conditions of the free hosting companies carefully, then you have read somewhere that they will sell all your data for marketing purpose but not your identity or personal details. Personal details are kept separate from your data.
If your website contains confidential data and you avail the services of a free hosting provider, then you may have the risk of losing your data. So, don’t use them as the hiring of Intellectual Property Lawyers may highly cost to you.
Restriction on Uses
There are some restrictions on the usage of free web hosting account, like your account may get deleted if you are having a construction on your website for 15 days or more. In this situation, the website shows the statement, “We hold right to delete inactive websites which remain in under- construction for more than two weeks”. If your account has a backup then other companies may get threaten in deleting your account.
FTP Restriction
You are not allowed to login via FTP for more than 3 times in a day if you are having a free hosting provider. If any update needs to make then you may have to wait. In this situation, the statement shown on the website “If you access your site too often your IP will be blocked”. But if you are having a long-term website, then this restriction may not be very practical.
Who is it for?
Free web hosting services are appropriate for the disposable websites. Yes, it is a good option when you want to test your site or its design or in the test mode if you live with an application of web. They are also relevant in the context of training and research.
Overall, it depends on your needs, where you want to utilize your hosting space and other factors. But it is recommended, choose professional or paid to host account over the free account.