Free vs. Paid Hosting - What's the Best Option for Your Home Business?

When setting up a website for your home business, chances are you will be looking for the most affordable option available. After all, when starting up a business, it is essential that you keep your costs as low as possible so you can optimize what revenue you do generate. When you start shopping for web hosting services, you may be surprised to find that many of them are free. It certainly is tempting to sign up for a free offer but is there a catch? How do you know what the best option is for your home business? Here are a few tips to help you decide.

First Look at Your Business Requirements

Before you start trying to figure out what is meant by all the various technical web hosting terms, take a look at your business. Of all people, you as the business owner will have the greatest insight into your business. Forget about the website for a moment.  Look at your business plans, strategies and objectives. Then start to ask yourself how a website will help you achieve those things.  Answering this question will help you define your goals and objectives for the website. Once you know what purpose you want the website to serve, it will help you choose the right hosting option. For example, if your business is selling training seminars then you probably want to use the website as a marketing tool to attract more customers. You may also want people to be able to download the programs that you are selling, or be able to sign up for a newsletter or forum. These may be features that are beyond the capacity of free hosting offers in which case you already know which options you need to look at.

Understanding Different Hosting Options

Two pieces of jargon that you will come across in your search for a hosting provider are shared and dedicated hosting. As a general rule of thumb, dedicated hosting is designed to cater to the need of large businesses with extended budgets. They have many great features but with a home business, you are unlikely to make use of them. More often though a small home-based business simply cannot justify the cost of having a dedicated server.  This then leaves only the option of shared hosting. Shared hosting is a more affordable option and usually what is included with free hosting offers. With shared hosting, your website will be hosted on a web server along with many other websites. Each website operates completely independently but they all share the same server resources. Because of this, there may be limitations on the amount of disk space that you are allocated. You may have to use specific scripts when designing your website and you will have to rely on your hosting provider to maintain the server properly.

The Pros and Cons of Free Hosting Offers

Free hosting offers can be very enticing. Why pay for something when you can get something very similar for free? Indeed, the biggest positive about free hosting is that there is no real cost involved. There are many reputable companies offering free hosting services, however, you need to do your research properly in order to know who they are. If you select one at random, you could find that you haven’t gotten such a good deal after all. Many free hosting service providers offer free hosting so they can get advertising space on websites. This means that you may have little or no control over the advertisements that are displayed on your website. The last thing you would want is a competitor’s advertisement placed on your website, or even worse, material that is offensive or distasteful.  When looking at free hosting options, read the fine print carefully. Find out if the package includes having advertisements displayed on your website and if you can have any control over what is displayed. Another downside to free hosting is that often the servers are oversubscribed. This means that there are actually too many websites for the server capacity. The result is that the server is either slow or goes down at regular intervals. This will affect the uptime of your website and your business as a whole.  Because you are not paying for the hosting service, this usually means that there is limited support or customer service.  When your website does go down, you may not be able to contact anyone who can assist you and this can be frustrating.

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