Free domain hosting - advantages and drawbacks

Free hosting for your domain (as opposed to paid hosting) is available in many places. A search in any of the top search engines will reveal hundreds of such offers.

However, before you sign up you have to decide whether the terms for any free hosting service are too restrictive to make it worth your time.

If you go with free hosting for your site you will have to accept one or more of the following - forced advertising, banner displays, pop-ups, pop-unders, limited disk space, limited bandwidth, time-limited hosting, giving your credit card number, no CGI, no FrontPage extensions, no Perl, disabling of your scripts and more.

If you want to put up a few simple pages, and host advertising around your content does not bother you, then free domain hosting may be the way to go. Many people who are creating their first web sites learn all about page design, FTP, scripting and so on this way. They also learn the issues around running a web site, and the difference between a good host and a poor one, before they take the plunge into commercial or paid hosting.

An important thing to bear in mind about free domain hosting though is that the free hosting service is under no real obligation to you: they may not have the staff to provide 24/7 support, and they will not guarantee uptime in the way a decent commercial host would.

The main problem with free domain hosting is with bandwidth - if you have a successful site which gets a lot of traffic, you may find that the free server will refuse to serve your pages after a certain bandwidth limit has been reached.

These limits are usually applied monthly. Bandwidth costs money for the host so they cap the amount every one of their free customers will get. If your site is capped, for a certain period every month no-one will see it, just a message like 'This user has exceeded their bandwidth, try again later.' You may even have seen such a message yourself when surfing the web. Would you ever go back to such a site?