FREE
WEBSITE HOSTING
Keeping
initial costs down may impose
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 website hosting services tend to have tight bandwidth
restrictions and come with only 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 website hosting
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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