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There are many
hosts out there. Some of them are free, and some of them require that
you pay for their service. A lot of "free" hosts also have "pay
for hosting" service, and then you get some improved capabilities.
What do you need from the free host clearly depends on what are you
planning to do with it.
Is it your personal site to show to your friends and family or your
hobby? Is it a simple site or is it something that requires some
"advanced" features like ASP, Perl, PHP, MySQL etc? You don't need to
know these to make a simple site.
You can do fine without any of them. In any case try to research about
that particular host you're interested in.
It is better to spend few hours researching then to loose a lot more
time and nerves later if you find out that your chosen host isn't up
to the job.
Bandwidth
You can compare bandwidth with how we spend electricity, gas or water.
When visitor comes at your page he uses some of your bandwidth,
spending it. Let's say you've made a 50 kb page. A 100 people would
spend 50kb x 100 = 5000kb or 5mb off of your bandwidth. So 500 mb
is enough for 10 000 people to see one 50 kb page. Obviously if there
is any forced banner on your site it would use a part of your bandwidth
depending on its size (unless otherwise stated). But then, you
will see that most of them free hosting sites give you a bit more to
accommodate their ad anyway.
Some of them will give you "unlimited bandwidth". But logically there
can be no such thing. They assume you would never use more than
the certain amount of it and most of the time it's true but if you
reach it you will soon find out that there's actual limit to the
"unlimited". Most of the time it's somewhere around 500 mb - 1gb.
There's another thing. Say, you get 1 Gb space. You will not use
all of it, either you will have to pay for more if you do, or they will
shut down your site for this month or day or hour, depending on what
are the rules. Now, most of the people don't use greater part of
1 Gb example and this gives the host an oportunity to sell or give this
space to other people. This is called overselling, but the
principle is the same with free hosting. This way they can have
more people then physically possible. The same thing goes for space.
Some of them say how much they will give you. It may be starting from
somewhere around 100 mb and go up to few gigabytes most of the
time. If you exceed the limit, your site will be temporarily
disabled till the end of the month, and then you start all over
again. But if you decide to go for paid hosting later take a look
at Terms of Use because many of them hosts will charge you dearly if
you exceed the bandwidth limit. Some of them won't even warn you.
Space
Even for a large site you may never need more than say, hundred
megabytes of space at most, to store all of your files if you don't
have a lot of mp3, zips or similar. Even 10 mb may be more than
enough but it clearly depends on what will you do on your site.
Banner
Most of them free hosts force some sort of advertising on your site.
It's almost inevitable in free hosting option. But there are
differences in how big ads are, where they are etc. There's just
few of them without any advertising forced but then they cut
somewhere else to compensate for it. You can just choose the one
which has the best overall features or the one you like the most.
Your ads allowed or not
Not much more to say really. If you can place your banner you may earn
something if you wish, if not then you can use this free hosting for
personal pages or other.
Inactivity limit
Nowadays most of the free hosting services will simply delete your site
if there is no activity on your account. So you must upload it often,
because inactivity for most of them means that you're not uploading
fresh content. It's 30 days mostly but can be more or less. If you
cannot find anything about it in TOS, it`s better to assume that there
is some sort of limit! There may be another kind of inactivity. If
there is no traffic on your site some free hosts may simply cancell
your account and that's it.
Paid option with the same host
Well if you need anything extra or if you think you will need more
bandwidth, it's easier if you can just pay for it and stay where you
are now. It may be important to retain your present URL if you have
used free subdomain for example, and search engines or referrers have
links pointing to this particular address. That way, for a small fee,
you retain your position and your visitors. And it's simpler too.
Your URL
Some of them will give you opportunity to host your domain if you have
it already, some of them will require it, while some of them will give
you subdomain address to use. So, your address may be
http://www.you.com, http://you.freehosting.com or
http://www.freehosting.com/you. Some of them may give you multiple
subdomains where you can use them as separate websites or as part of
the main site.
Upload
Free web hosts usually allow you to upload your files through their
file manager. It may be restricted so that you cannot upload more than
certain number of files at once or there may be file size limit, say
200 kb or 500 kb, or file count limit, say 50 files for example. There
may be FTP option also.
Other stuff
There may be php, cgi, mysql, statistics, guestbook, mailforms, polls,
custom error pages, counter but most of the time it's only basic
functions anyway. Popularity may be useful on the basis that well known
hosts have well known goods and bads so you know what you're dealing
with. Reliable host is a good thing to have but the truth is this can
vary. Judgements like that are based on the past and present time
performance, speed, support, how long do they exist, stability, any
server crashes, number of customers, etc. Once good performer may
just go down. Some free hosting sites may offer a lot at the beginning
for marketing purposes and then drop their offerings one by one if
successful, or they may just close their site if unsuccessful.
Sometimes there may be some requirements to get you hosted free like
forum posting or you may need approval. In those cases, features they
offer are most of the time much better than what usual free hosts have
to offer so it's worthy to check them out. Even though it's not
completely free because you have to win it or you may have to post in
forums, you still don't have to pay anything.
