Your friendly neighborhood webmaster here, coming out from behind the scenes for a comparison of free web hosting versus paid web hosting.

In her post, 5 Work at Home Resources and Tools, Lori’s top point was that a website will increase your exposure 100%.

But starting a website can be a daunting task your first time!

One of the first questions that comes up is, “Should I pay for hosting or use free hosting?” I wanted to highlight some of the differences between the two to help you make your decision.

Who Controls The Site?

This is one of the big differences. With paid web hosting, you have 100% control over your site. This often scares away people from paid hosting, because they feel they don’t know enough to manage a website. Free web hosts are attractive for this because you create content, but most of the technical stuff is handled by someone else.

By using a free web host, though, you’re subject to their terms and conditions. Blogger is one of the popular free blog hosts, and they have been known to shut down blogs that they feel violate their terms and conditions, and investigate later. Blogs that did not actually violate anything get reactivated, but the fact is that the blog could be shutdown without your consent, and be down until they decide it’s okay to reactivate it.

Wordpress.com, another free blog host, doesn’t allow any commercial sites so isn’t a good option for people who want to work at home.

Domain Names

Free web hosts often do not come by default with a domain name. So instead of having a nice web address for people to type in, you have something.blogspot.com. If you’re just writing a blog and not trying to make anything from it, that isn’t a big deal. But having your own domain is important if you’re going to be using various ways of monetizing your blog (and makes your blog seem more professional).

So even if you go with a free web host, read their help to find out how to get your own domain name.

Added Features

Paid web hosting comes with the ability to add on lots of extra features to your site. Want to add a forum? A photo gallery? A wiki? Generally this sort of thing can be installed on a paid web host with just a few clicks. You’re paying for the web space and bandwidth, and you can add all the features you want into that space and bandwidth for no extra charge.

Free web hosting generally has a limited set of features. Those that allow installing extra features usually have low limits on space and bandwidth.

Price

Price is obviously a big difference. Free web hosting makes a lot of sense if you have never blogged before and aren’t really sure you want to make it a career. You should still get a domain name (around $9 for the year) to ease the transition to paid hosting if you decide you do want to make a career out of it. But you can at least get your feet wet without a huge investment.

Paid web hosting runs about $5 a month for basic hosting. At this level you get web space and bandwidth, and not much else. More comprehensive solutions exist that will make site creation and management easier on you, and these range anywhere from $10 to $50 a month, depending on the features they offer.

Conclusion

You’ll find people on both sides of the free web hosting versus paid web hosting debate. The bottom line is that you need to evaluate your situation and see which fits best. Are you dabbling? Are you committed to working online? Do you have support from your family and friends for what you’re doing?

The answers to those questions will help you decide if an investment in paid hosting makes sense from the very start.

P.S. A common question is what hosting we use…doWAHdiddy.org is running on one of Site5’s $5 a month accounts, along with about ten other websites. If you get bit by the website/blogging bug, minimal paid hosting gives you the best value for your money, allowing you to create lots of sites for the same hosting fee (as long as you’re comfortable managing it all yourself).

Tags: free web hosting, paid web hosting

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