Just getting started in web hosting, it’s understandable that you would want to find a free web hosting service to use to lessen your startup costs. On the Internet, there are many of these types of services, and the issue of where to find free web hosting can be solved relatively easily. However, using a free service can be detrimental to the ultimate goal of your business. That is, to make sales.

To make sales from your business website, you should be concerned about branding, publicity, respect, and popularity, to name a few. Looking at this from strictly a cost perspective, the advantage is obvious. As you know, there is much more to this than just the cost, or lack thereof.

The prospect of free web hosting, in my opinion, should be viewed as a tool to test your website for a short time before moving the website to a paid, less restrictive service. Free web hosting services typically place banner ads, pop-up ads, and other nuisance type bits of advertising on your site that will compete with your content. With all of that going on, do you think your site’s credibility will suffer by driving your perspective customers away? I’m sure you can see how this would make any kind of success with your business website next to impossible. Don’t you agree? Do you think investing a few dollars per month on paid hosting would be worth it? Keep in mind that I am talking about a business website. If you’re building a site for fun, then a purely free web hosting service might be best in this case.

Another aspect of web hosting is definitely the issue of reliability of the hosting service. A free service most likely holds no guarantee whatsoever for uptime. Uptime is the percentage of time your site is “up”, or visible on the Internet. For a business website, having your site disappear would be disastrous. Let’s say for a minute that this happened to you, would you have a phone number to call for immediate help? Not likely! Even worse, what do you think your customers would be thinking if they couldn’t access your site – for days? This would obviously mean lost traffic, lost customers, and lost revenue.

I mentioned earlier that in my opinion, a free web hosting service could be used as a testing ground of sorts for a new website. This way, you can test certain aspects of your website such as keywords, traffic, even sales, all without spending any money. Not a bad way to get real-time, up-to-the-minute results, don’t you think? So, using a free web hosting service does have a place.

Learning where to find free web hosting shouldn’t be any harder than to simply do a Google search. You will find many providers that offer varying amounts of memory for your total site. Others will let you decide how many and what type of advertisements they will place on your site. So you see, you do have some control, albeit not much, over what would be the best for your site.