Presumably, everyone has heard of the saying, “the best things in life are free.” If there is one exception that disproves that theory, it is free web hosting. Over the years, a large number of free web hosting providers have come online in the hopes of attracting clients that can’t, or choose not to, pay for their web hosting service. It is also true that there are millions of sites (some of them quite popular, in fact) that have been hosted with such providers. But let’s look at a few reasons why free web hosting is not always the best choice for everyone.

1. Consumer Trust: Imagine yourself as a customer and think whether or not you would want to do business with a company that has its site hosted on a free server. Would you want to trade with a company that can’t afford to pay for the running of its own business? With the cheap hosting plans that are available today, you really can’t use expense as an excuse. Using GoDaddy as a prime example,  could  you really say that a $0.99 a month hosting fee is too steep a price for you?
2. Security: Would you, as a business owner, entrust the security of your business to a company that can’t be held accountable? A free hosting provider will usually take no responsibility for data loss or security breach. The logic is that the company is already doing you a favor by charging you nothing; hence, they owe you nothing. Furthermore, you can forget about adding an online store to your site: credit card companies require a secure server for you to use their secure online credit card processing applications.
3. Professionalism: If you haven’t figured it out by now, the reason you are getting free hosting is because the provider is making money by cutting costs to bare minimums and/or serving their ads on your web pages. You will not be offered website building and enhancement tools that can make your site look like it was built by a web design firm, granted many free web hosting providers can’t afford the price of such a tool. As a result, your site is bound to look bare or strikingly similar to all the other sites that are also hosted by the company. Visitors will take one look at your site and think that you really aren’t serious about your business.
4. Help with Promotion: Your website is only as effective as the number of times it is viewed by visitors. The more people see it, the higher the chances of making money from them. When you pay for your web hosting, you are offered various marketing tools to help you get the word out. You get help with your SEO campaigns, for example. At the very least, you will be treated with respect by search engines like Google and Bing who make it a point oftentimes to penalize sites that are hosted with free hosting providers, given the many spammy features they may servce.
5. Flexibility and Growth: When you pay for web hosting you are buying certain privileges – one of which is the ability to scale up or down without any fuss or difficulty. Paid web hosting providers, to begin with, give you a number of choices to select from. Usually, there are three: beginner plans, intermediate plans and advanced plans. Depending on where your business fits, you pay for one plan and setup shop. Later, when your business grows you can switch to a bigger plan. If you can’t find one that fits your needs, you can often have a customized plan created just for you and your unique business processes. With free hosting you usually get a single plan that you have to adapt to instead of it being the other way around. It is all so cagey and limited – your disk space might be just enough to load a medium-sized website without crashing. Bandwidth is limited and once you reach the limits, your site vanishes until the next bandwidth cycle begins. Simply put: it is pure torture to you, your site and – most importantly – your visitors.
6. Guaranteed Downtime: Paid web hosting providers guarantee uptimes of 99% and more. They invest money (which they get from clients like you) back into their hardware with the intention of making sure nothing fails. Do you really think that free hosting providers will spend more than they have to just so you can continue to do business all-year round? The reality is: you should anticipate some serious downtime if siding with a free provider, which may result in lost customers and revenue.

If you consider the six points mentioned above, you should see that the free option may end up cause for more out of pocket costs down the road. To that end, spending a little on a quality solution could be saving yourself and your business money overtime.