 FREE WEBSITE HOSTING
Keeping initial costs
down may impose restrictions
Running a complex and popular website usually comes with financial burdens, but creating
and maintaining an internet presence needn’t be a bank-breaking endeavour. One of the best ways to
keep initial costs down is to opt for a free website hosting service. These services provide web space for
you to store your site, although they often impose some restrictions.
The most significant of these is the domain name. Free website hosting services don’t provide
you with your own domain name. This means that, while you may be after www.lollyshop.com
you may have to make do with http://googlepages.lollyshop.com or www.lollyshop.freehost.com
This isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re building a website as a hobby, but it’s not ideal if
you want to appear more professional. Some free web-hosting services allow you to use your own domain name,
but you’ll have to buy this separately, often for a annual fee this can then redirect users to to your
free hosting package, so a visitor typing a website address into their browser actually ends up at a
different website.
Free web-hosting services tend to have tight bandwidth restrictions and come with a small amount
of web space. This limits what you can put on your website and how many people can visit. One way to reduce
the effect of these limits is to store disk hungry content such as photos and video elsewhere. You Tube can
host your video’s while photo service such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) can store images. Find out here how to embed You Tube videos
in your web pages.
While some hosting providers offer generous upgrading bandwidth limits and plentiful web space,
they may lack advanced features such as MySQL Databases and support for scripting languages such as PHP and
Perl. This may not matter at first, but as your ambitions grow and website expands, you may wish to add a
blog or add a customer database. Another advantage of a free service is that File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
access to your site may be limited. This means you must upload files using a proprietary web interface,
perhaps one file at a time, which can be a real aggravation if you have a large website with lots of
files.
You will probably also have to put up with some form of external advertising on your website if
you choose free hosting. Advertising is usually placed at the side or bottom of each web page. Often the only
way to avoid them is to pay a fee for your account.
Two Approaches to Freedom
Google Sites is an example of a completely free service. All you need is a Google Account, which is also free. Google Sites allows you to create a basic website using templates you
can modify. You get 10GB of dedicated storage to play with, and a limited range of tools. You can also add
gadgets such as clocks, search bars, and games. It’s a fast way to get a personal website, but it’s not suitable
for a small business and it won’t be easy to reuse the content or extend your site beyond the initial format if
you want to expand later.
One.com offers a hosting package which provides a more traditional
and complete hosting service. You get 3GB of storage for your web pages, images and other content, and
(amazingly) unlimited bandwidth. This is coupled with an unlimited number of email accounts, FTP access and
support for MySQL databases and a handful of scripting languages such as PHP and ASP. It is also easier
to scale up from this kind of website simply by upgrading your account and paying a small setup fee. The
package includes your own domain name, which you can use for a year, after which you must pay
to maintain it. This option is more suitable for burgeoning websites.
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