Professional vs Free web hosting

Is it worth using a free hosting service for your website, rather than paying up
some money to a professional web hosting company?
 
- NO, and read on to find out why:
 
1. Website hosting is run by servers, PCs that are designed for reliable and high performance of serving up websites. They cost money to buy and run. If you’re paying nothing, then guess what? They have to make money otherwise they go out of business. Ways of converting you to a paying client include: insisting on running adverts on your website that they take the revenue for; selling your details on to third parties for a profit; and adding you to their mailing list
and bombarding you with emails trying to sell you expensive services that you don’t need.

2. Free hosting don’t care about you. To them you are just a drain on
resources. Some of them have a reputation for never answering questions.

3.
Some free hostings don’t permit you access to the server panel, for example to
setup a database. You can be limited to just their website builder software,
which is a limitation indeed.

4.
Space allocation. Free hosts will generally want to cram as many websites onto
their server to maximize their return and this leads to something where you
have to be very careful of file sizes. Normally they are restricted to 10mb.
This may be fine for a small website, but for a good website with nice
graphics, email facilities and a video or two it will be insufficient.

5.
Reliability, is it important to keep your website showing all the time? Of
course it is. This is called the ‘uptime’, and as they are getting little
revenue from you they have no incentive to sort problems out quick.
Professional websites will be up all the time (99.9% uptime), whereas free ones
have been known to dip below the 90% mark.

So if your website is important you it’s important to invest a good professional hosting.

Free web hostings are OK for a playground to test things out, nothing more.