I am here today to talk to you about the price of free web hosting.
What inspired this post was the number of emails that I have been getting lately especially with this horrible economy, from people who are just so desperate to start making money online.
I do not want this post to come across as insensitive because I know that these are rough times and the economy is sluggish, people are losing their jobs left and right.
I understand that you may not have a lot of money to invest in a website.
The good news is that it does not cost a lot of money to invest in the website.
In some other posts I talked about website builders and I am a big fan of them but you do not have to use them to build a successful website.
That is one option if you can afford it.
Starting Your Business Online Is Very Cheap
It kind of makes me chuckle a little bit when people say: “I do not want to have to pay for a website. It is just ridiculous.”
If you guys want to make money, whether online or offline, whether you realize it or not, you are opening up a business.
And businesses require an investment of time and money.
If you want to complain about the cost of a website hosting, think about if you wanted to open up a business offline.
Say you want to open up a laundry and dry cleaning business on the corner or a convenience store or a clothing store in your neighborhood.
You have to put up some money in that business, right?
Do you know how much money you have to invest if you want to start a business offline?
Well, the beauty of the Internet is that domain name and web hosting is so doggone cheap.
Imagine a place where you can start a business for less than six bucks a month.
Isn’t that a beautiful thing that you can start your own business at any time for so little money online?
You have to kind of put into perspective so when the next time you complain about having to pay for website hosting, think about what it would cost you to start a business offline.
Using Free Hosts Is Very Risky
I just want to say that I am not a fan as you could already notice, of a free web hosting and I know that there are a lot of you that use free web hosts.
If you love it and you are doing great and you are using them for your hobby sites, I think that is wonderful.
But I used to be a customer of a free web hosting company years ago and let me tell you a short story.
The company decided to shut down or actually decided to start charging their customers for these sites after about fix or six years into me owning the site.
I got this email from the company saying something like:
“We appreciate you being a customer but in order to keep my business going, we can no longer offer our web hosting services for free. You are going to have to start paying and you either have to pay for your site or you are going to lose it.”
Now, fortunately for me, the sites that I had hosted on this hosting company, were sites that I could afford to lose.
They were not really making a lot of money and they were just kind of play around sites.
There were a lot of people who were really angry because they had businesses hosted on this free web hosting and they had to pay the fee and this fee was ridiculously high.
This company realized that people would rather pay the money than move their sites so they hiked up the price.
I was really lucky that I had sites that I was able to lose so I just let it go.
I just said forget it, just cancel my site but there were tons of people that were not as lucky and they have had to pay because it was not so easy to move sites to another host.
That is what happens with a lot of these free hosts, especially these no name websites that you can find everywhere.
They start out free because the company makes money from sponsor ads, affiliate links, google ads, but if that money is not enough to cover the cost of their hosting for them, because they have to pay for their own hosting accounts, then they have to start charging you to make up the difference and to continue to make a profit.
There is always a risk that you lose your sites or something else and it is just not worth it.
Free Hosted Sites Are Not Loved By Search Engines
Not to mention the search engines do not take you seriously when you have a free host.
There is the exception to that.
A lot of people would say: “What about Blogspot? Blogger is owned by Google. My blog gets a lot of traffic from Google because it is sitting on a Blogpost and Blogspot is owned by Google.”
That is the half-truth.
I do honestly think that blogger does kind of play favorites to Blogspot hosted sites because it is their product.
But even still, having a business hosted on a free account in my opinion, what is says to me is that you are not completely serious about your business if you can not invest the six bucks a month.
You Should Start With The Paid Hosting
With the hosting costs being so affordable these days, I honestly see no reason even if you just can not afford it right now, at least wait until you can.
Even if that means three or six months from now.
A lot of new webmasters ask me: “Can I just get a free blog and then when I can afford a paid web host, I can just transfer it over to a paid host?”
You can do that, but why go through the hassle of transferring your files over.
Why not start the right way at the beginning rather than saying: “Oh, I am going to start out on a free host and then transfer it later.”
I would rather wait until you can afford it, so you can go ahead and start with the paid web host and get it right from the beginning.
Hosting is very affordable nowadays and I see no reason to start a money making a website on a free web host.
Your Visitors Will Not Take You Seriously As Well
People that visit your site will not take you seriously.
If you think about it when you read stories about successful websites or when you hear about them on the news or you read about them in Newsweek, you never see an unprofessional looking site that is hosted on the Blogspot or WordPress.com.
Do you imagine seeing the site with the domain name that is mysite.blogspot.com on the BBC News?
It is always mysite.com or mysite.net and these sites you see on the news are hosted on the paid hosting sites.
You Can Not Do Much
Another disadvantage to free hosts is that you can not do a lot with them in terms of the functionality because a lot of the free hosts have security things place so you can not upload PHP scripts.
PHP is a language that is used a lot these days for chat rooms, sites or forums.
When you see forums that you go to, most of them are run by PHP scripts.
You need to have access or you need to be able to upload scripts in order to do these advanced things with your website.
When you are using a free web host, a lot of times those types of things are restricted.
Some of these free web companies may allow you to add a forum but they are going to offer you these template based, cheap things that are so limited and you can not do what you want to do with them.
Wrapping It Up
Bottom line is that free web hosting, it looks cheap and why would you want to start a business on a cheap platform?
I just do not understand why would someone do that.
Maybe it is something I am missing or maybe it is just me but I honestly do not ever see a reason that you want to start a business on a free host.
If you want to start out with a free blog and you just want to kind of see how a blog works and you want to practice your HTML or CSS, I can understand you.
You may be wanting to start just to get your feet wet, but you can start with a professional paid hosting account for less than $5 a month nowadays.
When you want your visitors to take you seriously, buy the domain, sign up for the web host because it is just not worth it to use the free ones.
You want people to know that you mean business and I always question the seriousness of someone when they say that they want to start a business but they do not want to pay anything.
At least, invest in your website hosting.
You may say: “Well, what about software?”
Well, you do not necessarily have to buy software or theme. You can learn how to code or you can just get a free theme.
I have to be honest, I am not a coder and I do not code from scratch, I always hire designers but you can get a very nice looking theme for less than $50.
The next time you will want to complain about having to pay for a website hosting, think about the web and how great it is.
Where else can you start a business and have the potential to make a ton of money and all you have to invest in three to six dollars a month for a web hosting.
You have to put it into perspective.
If you do not want to spend any money, I have to question how serious you are about your business.
Are you really taking this seriously or is this just something you are going to say: “Well, you know, I will try it. If it works fine, if it does not then fine.”
I think that people who are serious about making money online understand that there is an investment of time and even a little bit of money involved.
I hope you remember that.
Take care.