The 5-Minute Guide for Using Free Ecommerce Web Hosting	Visited: 1768 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Kevin Nelson June 10, 2008

Free ecommerce web hosting can be a great advantage to those looking to host an ecommerce site for minimal expense. With such hosting packages, you get all the benefits of having a web domain hosted on a server without having to come up with the monthly payments. This is possible because the hosting company will likely use advertising on your site to support the cost of allowing customers to host sites for free. In addition, some companies use this as a way to get customers in the door, hoping that eventually you'll decide to upgrade your account to one of the paid versions...not a bad strategy as long as the company provides good service.

When you first start up your ecommerce site, you can probably get away with using free ecommerce web hosting. That way, you can get things up and running without additional overhead. However, as your site starts to get more and more traffic, you might want to consider taking your hosting company up on the offer of an upgrade. In fact, depending on the amount of traffic you're getting, you might have no other choice. But by that time, you'll clearly be making enough to cover the minimal cost for hosting, so this makes for a win-win. You get to focus on growing your business without worrying about blowing your budget and the hosting company will likely gain another life-long customer.

But many free ecommerce web hosting services just aren't reliable, so this would be one of the drawbacks to using such a hosting package. If you're serious about running an online business, then excessive downtime can translate into hundreds or thousands of dollars per day. And since free ecommerce web hosting typically has limits on the amount of disk space available for your site, if your site gets too large or you have too many items you're interesting in promoting, you could quickly use up the available disk space.

You should definitely check out reviews of the top free web hosts that provide hosting for ecommerce sites. A quick search on any of the major search engines should turn up quite a few results. Just be sure you're comparing apples to apples in terms of what features they offer. Also be sure to take note of any differences in their service or customer support. That's the true test of any web host-when something goes wrong. And unfortunately no matter how much you pay, Murphy's Law still applies, so it's good to consider those factors as well.

With proper research, you should be able to quickly find a high quality, affordable web host for your new ecommerce site. And once your business is off the ground, you'll have a myriad of other options available to you when you decide to upgrade, but still at affordable prices. As always, be sure to check out reviews and ratings for top rated web hosts before making your purchase. This will allow you to focus on growing your business rather than troubleshooting your site down the road.