| MARK CRAWLEY'S |
ONLINESOLDIER.COM |
| Webmaster Basics and Essays | Design and Content | Webhosting | Making Money | Web Promotion | Links |
Free Hosting with no domain name
| You can use
freehosting services that provide hosting for free. This
can be done without a domain name and with no costs at
all. The downside is that freehosts can take away your
site at anytime and all of the traffic that comes with
it. Free webhosts include Schools that provide webhosting
services for their students, ISP's such as AOL which
provide small free webhosting space for their customers,
and free hosts such as geocities, angelfire, or tripod.
Companies prodiving free web hosting are having a
particularly hard time generating revenue so lots close
up shop all the time. On the surface using a free host provides a quick and easy way for anyone to put a basic website on the internet. Free hosts have drawbacks though. Free hosts often limit your diskspace or bandwidth to some really low level and turn off access to your site when you break certain thresholds. Free sites don't usually allow you to use your own scripts and programs in the fashion that a paid host would. Free hosts don't provide you log files so you can know your popular pages and the nature of the traffic that visits them. But beyond such minor restrictions the real problem with free webhosts is that they can take away your site at any moment for any reason. At such a point all the links pointing to your site and everyone that booksmarked your site will be cut off from your content. In a sense your site can be taken away from you. When one free host takes away your hosting you can of course host on another free site but all of the traffic and work originally put into making a site popular is lost forever. For some thats a very big loss even if their website is just a "for fun" thing. Free hosts also don't look as professional or cool. Its harder to remember geocities.com/ny/yoursite/index.html as opposed to yoursite.com. Consequently less people will come back to a free site as compared to a site with its own domain. Free sites are also looked down upon by search engines and directories, so it will be all the more harder to get traffic to the site. Also free sites since they are supported by advertising take away spots that you yourself could be placing advertising. In short free webhosting is good for practice and almost everyone practices there just to see how hard it is to create actual webpages that can be viewed by the world. But if one decides to put any large amount of effort into creating a website on any site for any reason even noncommercial ones, then a proper domain name and proper paid hosting are things that really need to be considered as paid hosting is not really that expensive. |
| Summing up Free Hosted Sites Make it hard for people to remember and bookmark your site. Appear less professional and make good search engine rankings much harder. Do not provide one with the ability to use scripts and programs as paid hosting does. Have very limited allowed resources. Can be shut down forever without notice or reason. |