Free hosting – Does it still exist?

Just 10 or 15 years ago, there were a lot of providers of free hosting. GeoCities and other providers were very popular at that time to host private websites. But the times have changed and with advertising such a thing is hardly to be financed today. Is there still free hosting? And if so, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Is there any free hosting at all?

There is still free hosting for own websites, even if it is not so widespread today by far. Providers like 111mb.de or safe-ws.de still make it possible today to host a small website for free. However, there are no longer the big providers in this area that everyone knows.

Another form of free hosting are providers like WordPress.com or Tumblr. Here one can operate also own Website free of charge, but one has no direct access to the Web space and can install nothing. Instead you use pre-installed blog software and for private purposes this is a good option.

Disadvantages of free hosting

In the private sector there is a lot to forgive, but as soon as you need hosting for a company website or something similar, it looks different. Both the free webspace providers and the providers of hosted blogs have some disadvantages (or let’s say restrictions) compared to paid hosting:

• Slow connection
  A slow connection is often one of the disadvantages. The own website loads only slowly, especially with somewhat more complex contents.
• no own domain
  Of course you don’t get your own top-level domain, but only a subdomain (myname.hosterdomain.de). That doesn’t look very professional.
• Failures
  Unfortunately, the free hosters are not exactly technically optimally equipped, so that it can come to rush hours also to failures of the own website.
• Storage space and bandwidth
  With free hosting, the storage space is usually limited, so that you get problems, for example, when using pictures. But also the bandwidth, i.e. the data transferred per month, is often limited. Thus it can happen that the website is no longer accessible towards the end of a month.
• Advertising
  Who offers free Hosting, must earn nevertheless somehow money. This is partly done by faded in advertising, which of course does not fit to your own website.
• Limited services
  Databases, certain script libraries, backups and much more are usually not available for free hosting.
• Security
  How well your own data is protected from hacks or other things is also in the stars with many of these providers.
• Reliability
  Whether such providers will still exist in a few years is the question.

As you can see there are a lot of downsides, to pick a good webhoster visit Webhosting Anbieter for a german hoster and Bestwebhoster if you have an international webpage.

Free is not free of charge

The list of disadvantages could certainly be continued, but these points alone should be enough to understand that free hosting has many disadvantages.

• On the other hand, there is the advantage of not having to pay any money. But does this mean that it is really free?
• No, you only have other, usually much higher costs:
• Visitors jump off because the website runs too slowly.
  Potential customers don’t buy anything because the domain seems dubious.
  Repair costs for the website because it has been hacked again and there is no backup at the hoster.

The opportunity costs for free hosting are very high. Much higher in any case, than the few euro, which one would have to pay for a beginner Shared Hosting package.

Therefore, I can only advise anyone who wants to build a reasonable website in any way to take a little money in hand and use a reasonable hoster. That pays off in any case.