Free web hosting sites

Free web hosting sites are still popular, despite the growth of cheap hosting packages which are now being advertised everywhere.

Nothing beats a free service, and if a free web hosting site can do the job for you, then by all means host your pages there.

The only drawbacks for those who wish to try free web sites hosting are the limitations which the hosting service will put on what you can do with your free space.

These limitations will often include a limit on the size of the space you are given for your files (or a limit on the size of each individual file), a limited amount of bandwidth every month (this refers to the traffic you get, or the 'hits' to each page) and a ban on certain types of file uploads - these would be things like zip files or MP3s. Because of their size, video files are often banned by most free web hosting sites too.

Other drawbacks may include the presence of the host sites' own advertising on all the pages - things like banners or pop-up ads (and you won't be able to turn them off) and no guarantee, under the terms of service, that the host will always be up and serving your pages to the public.

It is also believed that the search engines do not rank the pages within the free hosting services very well, and so getting traffic, even to good pages with solid content may be difficult or frustrating.

If these considerations are not important, or you simply want to get a hobby site or a kid's site up and running with no overhead, free web hosting may be for you.

For any type of ecommerce, or if you think pop-ups would annoy your visitors, look at shared hosting - .