Are You Using Free Hosting Services?

June 2, 2010 by  

Free web hosting is in many cases the most basic web hosting service that you can sign up with, and there are many free hosting providers available on the internet. The companies providing the free hosting accounts usually finance this by ads on the web sites that are hosted.

Another feature about free web hosting services – they are usually extremely limited. If you get a free hosting service, you are forced to have ads on the top and perhaps even on the bottom of your website, and depending on what your website is all about, it may not fit at all. However, if you are amongst those just starting out on the internet, a free hosting account may very well be the best option, since you probably don’t have a lot of traffic, or just a small site.

The type of domain that you receive when you sign up for a free web hosting account is usually a subdomain with the name that you pick (yourname.somefreewebhost.com) or a name in a directory (somefreewebhost.com/yourname). For example, if the name of your free host is the000webhost.com, then your web domain would be yourbusiness.the000webhost.com.

If you are a newbie, this is the type of account that you would probably want to get, but you should be aware of some of the shortcomings this sort of free web hosting account has, especially if you are looking for more advanced options:

Firstly, many free hosting accounts do not support databases. Databases are usually used for online data retrieval routines, or to manage dynamic content on your site, such as a wordpress blog. Many of these free web hosting sites do not even support the most widely used package called mySQL!

Secondly, the free webhosts may not support multiple email accounts; in fact they only give you one email account, which is usually a web based internet account (aka webmail).

However, recently some new companies has emerged, that will in fact give you a free hosting account without the recenly mentioned shortcomings; you get PHP, mySQL, email accounts and lots more! One of them is a free webhosting service found at the000webhost.com. They even allow you to host your own domain (a perfect reason to finally purchase a domain of your own), and you are not forced to display ads or anything like that. How’s that for an improvement!

The downside? – They will disable your account after 15 days without traffic, which could be a problem if you are just starting out. Some would call it a blessing, since it will force you to come up with new and fresh ways to generate web traffic to your site.

By Anders Eriksson, CEO and Owner Datorsam

Comments

4 Responses to “Are You Using Free Hosting Services?”

  1. sugar_white_yellow on July 6th, 2010 4:40 pm

    Sound like you have some trouble there. I do not know of any way for you to get into that email account. I guess I would try contacting Yahoo, but I would guess that it will not help you.

  2. anaj on September 23rd, 2010 7:08 am

    Another good thing about netvibes is that it allows you to see the status of multiple email accounts in widgets. I now have a separate tab for email accounts, and in that I keep the email widgets. Am still tinkering with it – they have a fitted gmail widget and I think you can only use one account for that, but there are various pop widget which you can also use for gmail accounts. It doesn't retrieve the messages, but tells you whether you have mail or not.

  3. Matrixgam1ng on November 27th, 2010 3:44 pm

    100% recommend this service and other services from AGL Host / jcpeters.

  4. buzz on December 13th, 2010 2:00 am

    with all different names but keep the same password for all of them so you don't forget thats what i do

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