The Advantages of Paid Web Hosting
You may be relishing over your site directed at quaint, suburban moms about baking cookies. Imagine the surprise of your visitors if an ad for a sex toy shop appears alongside your recipes!
Well, it's something you can expect to happen if you choose a free web hosting offer. Free web hosting comes with a price. You are expected to serve the ads of the web host at his or her pleasure and will include pop-up ads, spotty service, slow connections, or all of the above. You have no control over the ads placed in your site, and frankly, the host will not give a damn about your displeasure at seeing certain ads.
Technical support? Hah. It's free, baby. So, there's nobody at the other end of the line.
So, now you see the basic advantages of paying for web hosting. But don't fret at the thought of another monthly bill to pay. You can find very good hosting at very affordable prices. Why, great hosting can be found for less than $5 per month. If you're running a personal site or a small online business, these starter web hosting plans will satisfy your needs perfectly.
With paid web hosting your online life will be much easier too. If your web host includes cPanel access with Fantastico, for example, you will have a whole range of free pre-installed scripts at your disposal. A blog, a forum, a photo album or even a shopping mall can be set up within minutes. All that will be left for you to do is to add your content to your perfectly functional site.
If you choose a web host that guarantees an uptime of 99.9%, which is common, you can be assured that the lights do not go down on your site. A free web hosting option, however, gives you no such guarantee. The free web hosting provider may wake up tomorrow morning and decide to pull the plug on you. And this will be the end of your site.
But there's another important factor - your domain name.
If you choose to host your site with a free web hosting solution, you rarely get to choose a proper domain name. It will always be preceded by the web host's domain name. Of course, if you are running an online business, this choice will make your company look sloppy and unprofessional. It is simply not a proper option for a business website.
Through a paid web hosting solution, you can easily register a new domain name of your choice. You will pay maybe $10 and this will give you the right to the name for 12 months. Fill out the registration form with your web hosting provider and the rest will be done for you. You will need to wait anything from a few hours to a few days before you have access to your new domain, but it will be your domain.
So, after considering the above, maybe a few dollars a month may not be a burden after all
