A website is your storefront on the Web. It is the home of your business. A web host is comparable to the land you build your home on and it is very important that you build it right.

The problem is, a lot of online business owners choose a lousy web server for their home. It’s hard to understand but the web hosting industry is so competitive everyone expects to get the greatest features for insanely low prices. The hosting providers may promise the sky, but you almost get what you pay for.

That’s just a fact.

On the other hand, small business owners and affiliates sometimes have limited budget. The industry consists of companies of all types and strategies. You don’t always get the best service with the highest price.

Free Web Host, Why Not?

I always recommend against hosting your web site with free web host. If you are serious about building an online business, the cost of web server and other expenditures are much lower than starting a brick and mortar business.

Free web host offers no guarantee about reliability. Because you don’t pay, you have to accept what the host provides and can’t complain.

You can’t afford losing visitors when the server is down. You may lost sales. The visitors may think that your business is a joke.

Free web host usually offers less features and they cram a whole lot more accounts per server. This is bad news for your site as it grows. Even if your site have a few traffic, if one of the accounts uses the server resources aggressively, your site will be slow to crawl. And the fact that free web host doesn’t monitor their server as closely means you have to suffer or move to another web host.

Another thing is, free web host have to make money. They may keep the rights to put advertisements on your web pages. With unnecessary ads that are not in their places, you dilute the design and make your site look amateurish.

Others expect you to upgrade after you reach the usage threshold. In all cases, I suggest you start with a good and stable server.

Ample of Missed Features

Free web host usually offers no support whatsoever. You are pretty much on your own if you can’t get something work.

A good support is extremely valuable if not indispensable resource. Even if you hire a webmaster, spending a little bit more for web server is extremely important. Your peace of mind is worth much more than that.

I’ll leave the most important piece to the end. As a business owner, you should have your own domain instead of hosting your web sites inside a sub-directory or sub-domain of a free web host domain. Sure, they may help you setup your own domain on their server if you pay but again it is worth it to pay more and get yourself a real home instead.