Why to avoid free web hosting
When I started my first web sites, I also used free web hosting providers. My family still has two of its many web sites with one of the most popular free web hosting companies. But we feel starting of with free web hosting was the biggest mistake we made, and we do not actively promote our free web sites anymore. We are worried we will get shut down when we get more traffic than allowed by this free web host. And we don't like the excess of advertising and how slow are pages are loading.
Why you need a domain name
Promoting your web site to get lots of traffic is a lot of work. To get ranked on search engines like Google, you need to to get links from similar web sites to your web site. You can do that through link exchange, or other link generation strategies. The point is, that getting these links takes both time and effort. To protect that effort you need your own domain name. If you don't have your own domain name you can not move your web site to another web hosting provider when your current web host is no longer good enough, or when your current web host decides to shut you down because you get too much traffic. If you have your own domain name, moving your web site to another hosting provider is easy and you automatically take all the links pointing to your web site with you.
If you really insist on free web hosting, at least pay for your domain. That should cost you less than $10 per year, and you can get good free domain hosting from some domain name registrars. However, we recommend using a cheap web hosting provider, as you will soon want more domains and most cheap web hosting plans support multiple domains with the first domain free!
Cheap Web Hosting
Before you order your domain name, first look for a cheap web hosting provider. Many web hosting providers also provide you with a free domain name registration and, although it comes with your web site, you will own that domain name. So if you want to move your site you can. Having your web hosting provider take care of renewing your domain name each year just avoids a lot of hassles.
Cheap web hosting
does not have to cost you more than $4 or $5 dollars per month. I use
yoursite.com a lot, but they don't
offer a free domain. So recently I started using
$5 Hosting From Dot5Hosting!
and because I pay for two years I only pay $4 per month. If you promote your web site enough, you can easily
make enough money with
your web site to pay for your hosting. If your free web host uses popups,
move to a paid web host and get your own
popup provider.
So what are you waiting for.
Avoid making the same mistakes I made, avoid free web hosting.
N.B. This site is hosted by Lunarpages for about $7 per month, because of the excellent customer support and the high bandwidth they provide. Nice-one.com is my latest web site hosted at Dot5hosting.