Thursday, January 1, 2009

Look Before you Leap into Free Web Hosting

By Theodore Metagastar

There are many options available to us these days for free web hosting. Before you leap into a free hosting site there are things to consider. Building and promoting a website takes time, and you can lose many good features by choosing the wrong host.

Why do you want a website? Is it for connecting with your friends, and making new friends? Social networking is a big industry these days, with many sites such as Facebook and MySpace. You can easily invite and connect with your people.

For the photo buff you will want to consider a photo friendly site. While all the free web space hosts give you the ability to load your photos, web hosts such as flicker specialize in this area.

Many of the free web space hosts give you options such as templates and add on features. What they offer will vary depending on the host.

There is yet another level to free web hosting that many of these free sites do not allow, and that is the display of ads. Sure, you can talk about something you offer, and provide links to other sites, but many have it in their sign up that commercial sites are not allowed. Some do allow Google Adsense, such as the Blogspot site now owned by Google.

There are pros and cons to having your website on a free web space. One of the disadvantages is that you do not get to have your own domain name. The name of your site will always include the hosting service as a part of the domain. One example is a blogspot site such as http://atravel-adventure.blogspot.com. . This site has their own unique part of the domain, but the primary domain is blogspot.

If you are dead set on having your own domain name, one likehttp://afreewebspace.com, , you will need to arrange for a hosting service, which steps you out of the free hosting level into paid hosting. The great thing about paid hosting is that you can host multiple sites and will have greater latitude in what features you can have for your site. Your own site can be set up with basic html pages, or use a content management system, which we will discuss in our next article.

One thing for sure, if you find that your free web space is not going to give you all the features you would like, you can always change to another site. Youre not out any money, just your time. You can keep your free site up and running and link to your new site.

One good thing about having a free web space is that you have storage off site for your photos and ideas. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard someone praise their online free web site for keeping their precious photos when they suffer a computer crash or otherwise lose data.

There is no doubt about it, free web space hosting is the way to go for that starter website. Either way, your voice will be heard through your words and picture, or literally though MP3 files on your site.

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