Spotlight: When a Freebie Isn’t Free, Part 2
Part 2 – Websites
In the last Spotlight I talked about the disadvantages of using free email for your business and told you I would also take a look at free websites. Keep reading to look at what it could be costing you to use a website domain like yoursite.freehostexample.com or user.yourISP.com and why there are better alternatives that won’t break the budget.
A huge problem with many free webhosts is that they are supported by advertising. This can often mean annoying pop-ups for your visitors or adverts for the competition. In much the same way that you are advertising for your email provider by using a free email service, you are advertising for your webhost andother companies by using many free webhosting services, with a URL such as user.geocities.com or users.bigpond.com/~username. Free webhosts use advertising to pay their costs and supply their services free of charge to you. You will most likely have absolutely no control over the type of advertising that the service uses to support itself and pay for your site’s hosting. Not only can untargeted advertising appear unprofessional, many types of advertising are disruptive to the user’s experience when browsing your site; we’ve all experienced those annoying pop-up ads and flashing banners!
Free webhosts will often keep control of how much your site will cost them by limiting you to a certain amount of server space (the amount of space you are allowed to have for your website) and bandwith (the amount of data transfer you can have from their server). Imagine building up your online presence to have a visitor arrive at your site and find “This website has exceeded it’s bandwith allocation.” Do you really expect your visitors to come back next month to look at your site?
You might also find that so many people are crowding your webhost’s server that there is more ‘downtime’ than ‘uptime’. Most paid webhosts these days are able to guarantee uptime of at least 98% – this means there is a less than 2% chance that someone will not be able to access your website at any given time. A free webhost simply can’t give you any guarantee and you are taking a gamble on whether people will be able to access your website.
Many paid webhosts will provide features and customer support that free webhosts simply cannot afford to. If you are looking to implement a blogging system such as WordPress you will need a MySQL database, which free webhosts generally won’t provide. You will simply get a basic static site with little or no extras. Don’t think this doesn’t mean customer support is an extra – you get what you pay for, right? For a small monthly fee you are giving yourself the option to email or talk to someone who knows how to help you if you run into the smallest of problems, rather than searching the Internet for your answer. You may even find your free webhost can’t afford to support itself anymore and see it do a disappearing act – along with all your files. While I strongly encourage you to back up your files offline on an external drive, I’m sure you don’t want to see your website suddenly do a Houdini. If you don’t check your website at least a few times a day, how will you know it’s even gone until someone tells you?
Problems can also occur with search engines and URL redirection. Some free webhosting services will allow you to have your own domain name but if you look at what they are offering, you will find it is only a redirected URL. This leaves your URL that you have paid for (http://www.example.com) redirected to your webhost’s server. Your website with the content (http://exampleuser.freewebhostexample.com) receives the traffic and your URL remains without any content. It is not possible for the search engines to index your site without any content so you are paying for a domain that will not produce any worthwhile search engine results, and may even get you banned if the search engine thinks you are trying to somehow fool it.
I believe that webhosting is an important part of building your website and if you truly believe in your business it is something you can’t avoid investing in. There are so many great low-cost providers out there that there is no reason to choose a free service just to save eight or ten dollars a month!
This series will continue in the next Spotlight and I will give you some tips on How to Choose a Webhost.
Do you have any questions that I haven’t answered about using free website services for your business?
DISCLAIMER: This opinion-based article is not aimed at any particular service providers and the providers named are used for example purposes only.
