Free Web Hosting Tips
by Sebastian Ghiurca
With the wealth of free web hosting offers it's sometimes hard
to decide which provider fits you. This article is meant to
underline a few aspects you should keep in mind when choosing
such a service.
1. The reliability of the service and their offers.
A brand new hosting provider which boasts features that are too
good to be true usually won't last for too long. Let's take the
example of one host (I won't give names here) that went offline
only a few weeks ago. They were offering 500MB of storage, 10GB
of bandwidth per month, domain hosting, unlimited domain
parking, CPanel with just about all possible features,
absolutely no ads (not even a request to link back), and this
only for 150 posts in their forum. Sounds too good to be true?
Betcha! After they cashed in two fat checks from AdSense they
simply went offline. No prior notice, no apology, nothing.
Things to watch out for: - Design. If the site looks like it was
bought from a man in a white van, or if it's using a design from
a free template site, it's probably just a waste of time. If
these guys couldn't pay a web designer $100 for a decent layout,
they don't probably have the skills to run such a site. - How
long they've been around. I'm not saying that new sprung hosting
services can't make it, just be careful when choosing one that's
two months old. - Check their Google PR, ranking on free hosting
directories and any other location you might think of. If the
site has tons of inbound links, the owners have probably spent a
considerable amount of money advertising it, so they plan to do
their best to keep the service up.
2. Ads
Advertising placed on your web space is how free web hosting
providers support their service. Having someone else's ads
displayed on your page is usually the price you have to pay for
their free service. There are a select few hosts that won't plug
in banners or other forms of advertising in exchange for your
performing other services in their favour (like posting in their
forum or referring other members). What you should look for: -
How well the ads blend into your design. A red frame at the top
will probably not go well with your blue template. If possible,
pick a host that allows you to place a banner code anywhere you
want-- this way you can put it wherever it best fits. - Whether
or not they display targeted ads. If your site is on dog chewing
toys and the ads are on car deals your visitors will probably
not like it. Worse, watch out for sites that display
pornographic ads. - What kind of ads they're displaying. Never,
under any circumstances, sign up for a site that advertises
through popups. Popups are extremely annoying, and most visitors
will not return to your site. - Do they allow your own ads to be
displayed? It's one BIG issue you should know before signing up
if you plan to make money with your site.
3. Tools and scripts available
Forums, guest books, counters, polls are always nice features to
add to your site. If you can't or don't want to handle
installing such an addon from a third party you could look for a
host that already provides it. Keep in mind that these tools are
not always the best and that there are most likely many other
free ones out there. On the other hand, if your chosen host
provides very few or no such tools, then it's probably either
running on a slow server and doesn't want to clog it up or
doesn't give a dime about their customers.
4. Monthly bandwidth and what they do after you eat it up
Always, no matter how small your site is, look for a host that
offers at least 1GB of traffic per month. Also consider going
with a host that will offer you a paid subscription if you go
over this quota instead of simply blocking access to your page.
Say you hit the jackpot and visitors start flowing in like crazy
from day one. Next day you don't want them to see a page like
"Sorry, this site has gone over the allotted bandwidth, please
check back in a month or so".
Try this simple calculation: say your pages average 50kB,
including images, or (approx.) 0.05MB. Now let's say your
visitors browse 3 pages on average, before they leave the site.
That's 3 x 0.05 = 0.15 MB. If we divide 1GB (or 1,000 MB) by
0.15, we get 6,666 -- the average number of visitors you can get
in one month without going over the bandwidth quota. Divide that
by 30 and you can have 222 visitors per day. Also keep in mind
that search engines also eat up bandwidth, a deep crawl from a
spider can eat up as much as 100MB if you have a lot of pages.
5. What your URL will look like Even though you can get a short
URL for free from services like http://go.to or a subdomain
(.co.nr / .biz.ly etc), it's always best if your host can offer
you a URL that's easy to remember. Choose a host that offers a
subdomain if available (http://youraccount.theirdomain.com as
opposed to http://www.theirdomain.com/youraccount).
Note This article may be freely distributed as long as there is
an active link back to http://web-design-tutorials.blogspot.com