Free Website Hosts Information

Free Website Hosts Information

What is a web host?

A web host is a service provider – a necessary company you must use in order to have a website. A web host simply provides you the “Internet space” for your website.

You can park your domain name for free while you’re developing your content, but once it’s live and ready for the public – you pay the web host a monthly fee to keep your website open for business.

Can I Pick One of the Free Website Hosts?

I cannot endorse using any of the free website hosts for a business website.

They promise that you can have a free website up in minutes but these sites are often limited, clunky, unattractive, and do not help with the branding of your business. I don’t recommend these free website hosts.

It’s just as easy to get a low cost, affordable business website host to do the job the right way.

Depending on your needs, like the amount of space for your “inventory” (pictures and video take up a lot more space than pure content sites), you can pay more or less depending on the web host and package you choose.

Why do I need a web host?

While you have secured your business address (domain name), you still need an internet web host provider. Let’s continue with the analogy ... if your domain name fees are similar to a broker’s fee in finding your business property, then your web host would be the landlord, who collects the monthly rent for providing the space and maintaining the building systems.

Choosing a Host

What are your website needs?

Budget or sophisticated? Generally if you are planning to make a website, consisting on mainly text content, then most budget plans and web hosts will work for you.

The free website hosts are not an option, even for the simplest of needs. Don't hurt your image with these free website hosts.

Only if you are planning to have a lot of video, pictures, or special functionality like a database, would you need to upgrade to a premium plan or web host.

For example, if you are building a website devoted to your photography business or a website that will catalogue hundreds of pictures, video, etc. – then you should consider starting with a more premium web host package that will give you more space online for all of your digital inventory.

Find your ideal match by reviewing the packages of some different web hosts. Pay attention to what features each web host offers in their packages. For your first website, your main concerns are likely to be price and reliability.

Any respectable web hosting company must be extremely reliable. If the web host does not prominently display their “uptime” on their website, I would think twice about using them.

I expect any good web host to have at least a 99% uptime – in other words, they are up 99% of the time, and only 1% of the time will your website be unavailable due to their technical issues.

In order to reach your website goals, you website needs to be up and “live” online as much as possible.

These are the important considerations when choosing a web host:

· reliability
· price
· breath of features
· depth of offerings

The types of features vary from your quota size to the number of free email addresses you receive. The premium packages give you the option to add more advanced features such as a database or ecommerce functionality (i.e. add a shopping cart to your website to sell a product or service online).

If you are not sure of which type of package you should choose, I would recommend first choosing the most inexpensive package from a reliable web host.

If your needs change, it should be very easy for you to upgrade from the basic plan to a more premium package at the same web host. Just call the web host’s sales department or customer service line to confirm, and they should be happy to help you upgrade any time.

Ideally you will choose a winner but can always change your web host company at anytime if you signed up for a monthly plan. And you will always save your website files to your computer so you can easily transfer them to a different web host without losing your content ...

So after you've signed up with a web host, you will transfer your newly purchased domain name to your web host. This step may be optional if you are using the same company to buy your domain name and host your website, like GoDaddy.

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