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There are many different types of web sites on the internet. If you want a simple personal page and can deal with some inconveniences, a free web host may be alright for you. However, if you are expecting a large number of visitors, or are using the web site for anything of significance, a free web host is going to be quite frustrating and unprofessional.
First of all, most of the free web hosting services that can be found on the internet require that advertisements are shown with your web site. Sometimes these can be simple links at the bottom or top of your page while other times they can be very intrusive and may even include pop up advertisements. This can quickly become frustrating and confusing for your web site visitors driving them away from your site. The reason that they usually require advertisements to be displayed on your web page is because they will make money each time one of these advertisements is clicked on. Meaning they can still make money even though they are allowing you to put your web site on their servers for free.
Another major issue with most free web hosting services is their unreliability. Often they are slow and cannot handle a large number of visitors to your site at a time. Free hosting servers will often be hosting thousands of web sites at the same time causing very slow speeds for people viewing your site. They usually will not guarantee that the server for your web site is going to stay up for any amount of time, and when you do run into problems with your web site, there usually is no support to help you resolve these problems.
Some of the other main issues with a free web host include the lack of storage space that you are allowed on the server, the restriction of advertising on your web site (because they want to use their own advertisements instead) and content restriction preventing you from posting some types of information on your web site. Many free web hosts also do not support various types of dynamic scripting with their servers including php, asp, perl and others. This is going to greatly restrict many of the things that you could do with your web site if the server did support these types of scripting.
Finally, if you have your website hosted using a free service; you will most likely be stuck with a long URL that is not going to be very easy for people to remember. You will also be open to many different security threats as these web hosts do not put money into maintaining a secure network. In fact, sometimes these free web hosts will actually sell your contact information to spammers.
If this sounds like it is going to be more hassle than it is worth, it is because it is. Especially since a paid web host can cost as little as $8 - $10 per month.
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