Why should I pay for web hosting for my business?
Small businesses are always aiming to keep their prices down and save wherever they can. If you are considering starting an online presence for your business, whether that is an online store or general information about your business. Saving money is always a plus!
With free domains such as dot.tk and web hosting that doesn’t cost a penny. This seems a plus at the start, however we would not recommend going down this road. Of course you can purchase a well known Top Level Domain (TLD) such as .co.uk .com or .net etc and point them to your free hosting package, however there are several reasons why you should avoid doing this.
Have you ever considered the costs of running servers?
Unfortunately we live in a world where nothing is free. Why would any company be prepared to cover the costs of running servers, electricity and man power to keep the servers running smooth. With technology there are always a chance of an outage, a system error or any other issue. Why would a team of people be sitting around 24 hours a day 365 days a year ready to pounce, when an issue is raised to make sure your website is not affected.
Free hosting companies who are willing to offer you web space for nothing have other ways of making income for the service that they are providing. This can vary from flooding your website with advertisements, they do this for commission on a per click and per view basis. If no advertisements are used on your site then Free Hosting companies often charge you for more than one database, email account and additional features such as a cPanel, Plesk, Softaculous or a range of different tools. Some free hosting providers require you to contribute to their forums on a monthly basis, failing to this will result in your account being deactivated.
With a high number of users using Free Hosting over the world this leads to slower servers and potentially website downtime. Not ideal if your website goes offline during a transaction for one of your customers. Many users sign up to Free Hosting packages as they only require an email verification to activate, no credit card or bank details are exchanged. Once a user has registered, knowing that they have only verified their account by an email they can often maliciously use their account to spam other users, run scripts to overload the server or create unethical content which often makes the IP address blacklisted in Google. A black listed IP address will have an impact on traffic coming into your website. Once a server becomes slow, this also has an impact on your sites ranking in Google.
If a company is offering you Web Hosting that is free what happens if something goes wrong?
Of course computers are mechanical and parts get worn or bugs appear in software that can potentially impact your business. Not all companies regularly update patches or change parts as often as they are required. However a potential exploitation in you’re a system can have vital consequences if it is not fixed rapidly. You may need to contact your hosting team, this may take days, weeks or even longer if its via a web forum. Have you ever looked at the phone numbers some companies use? Premium charges or international numbers can become costly, especially if you are on hold whilst you wait for companies to fix other users issues.