Hosting Reviews and Comparison is No Joke
With the proliferation of blogs and personal websites, many people are turning to the internet to keep their daily diary, or a collection of items about their family or selves - not to mention the huge growth and acceptance of the internet for business marketing purposes.
With this exponential growth of websites comes a huge demand for affordable, easy to use hosting services. While there are many free hosting services with these new social networking sites, cheap website hosting has many advantages over the free versions. Host comparisons and reviews will help you with your decisions. This beginners guide to hosting may help as well.
About Free Web Hosting
Is anything really free? That’s a wise moniker that goes a long way… especially online. For any free hosting service provider you come across, there are always disadvantages of free webhosting. To begin with, you cannot have your own domain name in many instances. Instead of your own domain name (EG: www.MyDomainName.com), you’ll likely receive a folder and limited space at the host’s domain name. Your domain name will usually appear after the “/” of the hosts full domain name (EG: www.FreeHostingCo.com/MyDomainName). While this may be acceptable for a family photo album, it’s not good for business in the long term because you are not able to establish your own Web presence.
Other disadvantages include; limited ’server’ space, typically unrelated advertisements may preside on your web page and that can push away your visitors, limited functionality of database features (if any), and limited programming and script running capabilities. So, most of the time you are not able to expand your site past a few informational pages, and you will have to conform to the host’s programming limitations. As well, features and capabilities for web development will be very limited.
Paid Web Hosting Explained
A paid website hosting provider usually provides web space and hosting services for a given dollar amount, to be paid monthly, quarterly, yearly, or even several years in advance. Hosting fees are varied and costs are usually determined by size of server space as well as the server functionalities required for your personal or business web site. EG: If you require a database, or special services such as a .net framework, hosting costs will vary considerably.
A typical hosting service should provide popular businesses website hosting services including; self-managed dedicated hosting, managed hosting, co-location hosting, PHP hosting, MySQL hosting, SSL encryption, and so forth. The service you choose and related costs will depend on the extent of functionality and purpose of your website.
Domain name registration is often included with quality hosting packages, but if not, there are many services for registering your domain name, typically by paying a yearly fee or a discounted multi-year fee.
The benefits of paid hosting over free hosting are obvious.
- Typically has very large or unlimited storage space
- Can choose and host your own domain name
- Develop your own ad free content pages as well as shopping carts, user login sections, photo galleries, articles, blogs and other functions.
- Increased server reliability. Free servers are know for excessive and frequent down time. Many paid hosting services guarantee a certain amount of up time, such as “guaranteed 99% server up time.
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In conclusion, free web hosting providers are a good choice for personal websites or even for limited ad sites for small local businesses. But for a full-time, operational Web business, a paid hosting provider is the way to go. View our reviews and comparisons of web hosting providers here.
Tags: comparison, reviews, web hosting