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Why you should avoid free web hosting: How it can harm your online reputation and security



Correction! I credited the wrong person in my comments, this is a great piece that many individuals seeking the personal gratification of building a website should read. Great job to the Editorial Staff, and many apologies for crediting the wrong person, be well!




Why you should avoid free web hosting, must read



You know by now that you need web hosting, but do you really have to pay for it? Some searches online may reveal free platforms you can build your website on that come with hosting or free web hosting providers. Why not just go with one of them?


If you are sure that you want to go with free hosting, there are a number of options out there. Five of the best that we have found are from Bluehost, Dreamhost, A2 Hosting, Siteground, and WP Engine.


DreamHost is a service known for providing options that meet the needs of a wide range of users. It offers a FREE Shared Hosting plan (including email hosting) to non-profit, charitable organizations registered in the United States. Its plans include website builders, database backups, and SSL certificates as well as one free domain name. DreamHost plans start at $2.59 per month for WordPress hosting, website builder, or website hosting; VPS hosting is $10 per month; cloud hosting is $0.0075 per hour, and dedicated hosting is $169 per month.


If you have a free hosting account, you will need to check your site frequently to make sure it is up and running the way it should be. If you are tired of having to monitor the site, paying for hosting is a simple solution.


Regarding a free web host, any employee can access and configure/access/delete your file whenever they want. Such companies enforce no proper rules to prevent this from happening. So, you should not expect any of your data on the free web servers to be completely private.


GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). GitHub Pages sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.


To enable static website hosting, select the name of your default file, and then optionally provide a path to a custom 404 page. If a blob storage container named $web doesn't already exist in the account, one is created for you. Add the files of your site to this container.


WordPress.org is not considered a web host and instead is a popular content management system (CMS). Because of its flexibility, it suits any type of website and is one of the most popular choices among site owners. To understand the difference, feel free to read our article about what web hosting is.


Nearly every web host offers shared hosting, the cheapest form of web hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server and server resources with many other sites. If you want to keep your web hosting budget small, and don't expect much traffic, shared hosting is the way to go. You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for this web hosting type. This level of hosting is really best suited for small sites that don't need a huge amount of bandwidth, however. Since you're sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors. Free web hosting is available if you're on a tight budget, but it comes with its own caveats (typically ads and extremely low server specs).


Larger businesses that expect big traffic to their sites should pick VPS or dedicated hosting, each of which offers increasingly powerful server specs. VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server's resources, which are also a bit more segregated. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you should pay less than $100 per month.


Yes, you can make a website for free. But should you? Sure, a free website will work, it will look OK, and people might even visit it. But there are significant compromises you'll have to accept, and you could end up regretting going with a free website.


We'll explain why you should pay to create a great website, and set out the downsides of trying to do it all for free. However, if you're just here to try out a website builder, we won't waste your time and you can get started here.


The free version is so limited that you'll soon need to upgrade. To avoid the hassle of trying to move your site and its contents to another provider (which often isn't even possible unless you upgrade), you'll probably just cave, and pay for their service, even though it's more expensive than most other premium options.


If you read the T&Cs of most free hosting providers, you'll find out you don't actually own that website. If you ever want to sell or transfer your site to someone else, you can't. It's their property, not yours.


Make sure you read the small print carefully. Some free hosting providers have also been known to retain ownership of your content too. That's pretty insane, and especially troubling for professional photographers and artists who might upload images of their work.


Let's say you publish a post that starts to become popular on Reddit or StumbleUpon. It's likely that you'll quickly exceed the bandwidth limit you get as part of your free hosting. Your site will go down, and you'll lose tons of readers.


InMotion Hosting, our pick for best web host for beginners and another standout in the world of shared hosting, gives its mid-tier Power plan to educators for free. Check out my InMotion hosting review for more info on the hosting company.


000webhost, powered by Hostinger, is also one of the most popular free web hosting providers. In 000webhost free hosting, you will get a cPanel, a WordPress auto-installer, a website builder tool, etc. The hosting platform supports PHP, MySQL, CSS, JavaScript, etc., and also, there is no need to place unwanted ads by the service provider (i.e., Ad-free hosting). Also, the 000webhost offers you secured service as its servers use advanced firewalls with DDoS protection that ensures the protection of your website. You can use 000webhost free hosting as long as you want, and if can also upgrade to paid plans to access additional features.


Weebly serves your site across the whole server system which enhances the performance rate of your site. Apart from the free hosting plans, Weebly also offers some premium hosting plans. You can upgrade to these premium plans to avoid Weebly ads, to use a custom domain, unlimited storage, etc.


WordPress.org is the king of free blogging sites. It is a free platform, but you need to build the site mostly by yourself afterward. You also have to host the software yourself. While you can find some free WordPress hosting, a better long-term strategy is to pay a moderate amount for a solid WordPress host.


Medium is a multipurpose platform tackling diverse topics, where anyone with an account can write. Unlike most other free blogging sites, the big advantage of Medium is that your articles will be exposed to a wide audience since the platform is visited by 60 million readers (*) per month (and the number increases every year).


Compared to paid shared web hosting, you do not get all the controls you need to manage your website with free hosting. When setting up your site, you will have to limit yourself to a few configurations.


It is worth remembering that a joint purchase greatly simplifies the process of further customization. This option should be considered for beginners in order to avoid the need for additional settings.


For most informational websites, the level of acceptance provided by a free AutoSSL is adequate. However, large-scale enterprises (like an eCommerce store) that accept private data about their customers should consider a paid SSL from a respected certificate authority. Premium SSLs from certificate authorities often provide support and warranties in addition to being widely accepted in all browsers and devices. This is why many payment processors require you to purchase specific, premium SSLs.


You also need a clear goal in mind. What is the main objective of your blog? Is it to inform the public? To eventually retain paid subscribers? With a clear final objective you can grow a blog that satisfies these goals in the long term.What should my blog be about?Answer these questions: What are you passionate about? What do you think about daily? What topic do you annoy all of your friends, family, and co-workers with on a regular basis? What do you find yourself dreaming about? What do you find yourself constantly researching? What do you read about?


Yes! A self-hosted WordPress blog is a open-source, which is completely free. And there are two different WordPress options, both free, but COMPLETELY different, which you should be aware of. Choosing between them is one of the most crucial decisions you will make.


The index document name is case sensitive and must exactly match the file name of the HTML index document that you plan to upload to your S3 bucket. When you configure a bucket for website hosting, you must specify an index document. Amazon S3 returns this index document when requests are made to the root domain or any of the subfolders. For more information, see Configuring an index document.


With a free web host, you shouldn't expect to get your own domain, i.e. a website URL that looks like www.[domain].com. That sleekness and simplicity is a luxury you'll have to pay for separately. However, you'll probably be treated to free domain hosting so long as you've purchased your domain name somewhere else. If an individual domain is not necessary for your website, however, free web hosts almost always give customers at least one free subdomain. That is, your website URL will look more like www.YourWebHost.com/YourWebsiteName.


The good news is that nearly all free web hosts do have paid plan options with these advanced features if your site demands them down the line. Just keep in mind that switching from one web host to another can make it difficult to migrate your content. So to avoid that potential headache, you may want to start off with a web host that has a free plan, but also offers plans with the features you think you may want in the future. Staying with the same host in the long-term will just make it so much easier to upgrade if or when it's needed. 2ff7e9595c


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