How To Decide Between Free Web Hosting And Paid Web Hosting For Your Blog

There are many choices for web hosting companies available and for blogging there are many free choices offered as well. The question that comes to mind to me is, “Is free webhosting cheap?” What I mean by that is what is it going to cost me in terms of functionality and accessibility. Let’s take a look at some of the comparisons between free web hosting and paid web hosting.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years then you know that blogging has become a formidable force on the internet and has allowed many people to get an online presence that may otherwise have been unable to do so. Many of these people are making their living by blogging and some like Jason Calcanis have become wealthy from it. Jason built a network of blogs over about eighteen months and sold them to AOL for nearly $30 million! That’s a pretty good ROI. Anyway, I digress, back to our discussion on web hosting.

If you have decided that you want to operate a blog your next choice will probably be what blogging platform or software you want to use to accomplish you blogging. Relax, it’s easy. Most of the blogging software out there today is open source which means it’s, you guessed it, free! In this instance free is not a bad thing, I use WordPress almost exclusively, it is free and has more options that I care to learn or use. There are other blogging software options available, but I won’t go into them here because this article is about web hosting.

As far as web hosting for your blog you can choose free web hosting or paid so let’s take a closer look at our choices. First off, you can choose Blogger which is owned by Google. Blogger is a good program especially for beginning bloggers because it is easy to use, it is web based, and the price is right. It’s free. With that said however, if your intention is to blog professionally and possibly run a large number of blogs with automated content then Blogger is not for you. I have seen Google shut down many blogs because they considered them to be spam. If you want control over your own destiny then you want to use paid web hosting and have your blogs on your own server, or at least a shared server.

Still in the realm of free web hosting you also have a fairly new option from WordPress who now offers a free web hosting for WordPress blogs at their .com site as opposed to the .org site where you get the software and plug ins. The problem is that like Google, they are very restrictive with what you can put on your blogs and how you update them.

Another big issue with free web hosting is that you will usually have to display advertising of some sort which “pays” for your web hosting. This is great for the web hosting companies because it gives them tons of virtual real estate out there with their name on it, not so great for you. If you are blogging professionally, and if you are trying to make money for it then you are blogging professionally, you do not want any distractions on your site that leads visitors away from your site unless you are being paid for it like you do when someone clicks on an Adsense ad or affiliate banner.

My recommendation is that you pay for your own hosting because it gives you a wealth of choices, much more storage space, and takes almost all restrictions off of you within reason. There are still some web hosting companies that will not allow you to host gambling or porno blogs but other than that you are pretty open. Paid web hosting is not that expensive. You can get an account that will host as many blogs as most people will want to deal with a few bucks a month. So for the cost of a domain name and your hosting you will probably be around $100 a year. That is a pretty cheap investment for something that enables you to plug into all the ways of earning money on the net.

Choosing a Web Host: Research Before You Decide

Hundreds of hosting providers are competing these days to attract customers in different ways. In most cases, their offers look very similar, especially to those who are new to web hosting, making the selection of a good hosting provider a very difficult and confusing task.

If you are new to web hosting, you first need to know the basics of web hosting. You should know the answers to the following questions:
1. What is a web host?
2. What are the available host server platforms? What are the differences between server types?
3. What is the bandwidth?
4. What is a domain name? How Can I get one?
5. How can I create web pages?
6. What are scripting languages? What can I do with them?
7. What is FTP?
8. What features do I need for my website?

If you don’t know the answers to the above questions, you can find answers and hints here.

If you are only intending to build a small and simple personal website to publish your pet’s (or family) pictures, then you don’t need to worry, almost any hosting plan will meet your needs. You can go for the cheapest provider, even free ones.

However, If you are about to build a business site to sell goods or services, then you have to be careful about all the details of your new web host. You must read, research, compare and then decide. You don’t want to spend your time, effort and money to attract customers to a website that is not up to your business requirements; this will really hit your image.

It is certainly important to study the features required in the hosting plan. You must know what does storage capacity, bandwidth, platform and scripting languages mean, and how important each one is for your new website, but this is not enough, not at all.

After you shortlist the candidate hosts to only include the ones that meet your requirements, do some research on providers’ history, read some unbiased reviews about their services and explore some customer experience. These are the factors that should make your final decision.

Be careful when researching such information about a provider. Performing a quick search on google about “best web hosting” or “top 10 hosting companies” will not directly return the right and honest information. Most of hosting reviews sites are not actually providing honest reviews. Instead of giving it based on the quality of service, the highest ranks and best reviews are actually given to the companies paying higher commissions to their affiliates. I’ve seen this on quite a lot of review sites.

So, after you have narrowed your web host choices to several providers, you’ll need to take a more in-depth look at them before deciding which one you should go with. You have to perform a thorough evaluation process which might take hours, or even days, for each choice. Sources of information that can support your evaluation process can be in:
1. At least three honest and unbiased review sites.
2. Several reviews in more than one web hosting forum.
3. Direct feedback from real customers of the candidate providers.

Web Hosting Review Sites
Hosting directories and review sites are useful in the process of narrowing your search, especially those who provide an automatic search utility based on price, space, bandwidth, OS, etc. which can save your time and effort in this aspect.

Avoid review sites with “top 10″ sort of recommendations. Go for those which provide user reviews, and read the reviews carefully. Compare reviews and user opinions from as much review sites as you can, at least three. As stated above, be careful when reading customer reviews as some hosts might encourage their new customers to write favorable reviews by offering some advantages.

Web Hosting Forums
Open forums are important source of reviews and customer experience. They are open places where customers can write their reviews and opinions about their hosts. However, they can have the same problem as review sites: a provider can write very positive reviews about his own company. The opposite might also happen: competitors can write very negative reviews about their competitors. In some forums, this activity is not permitted. Moderators are strictly monitoring the forums for such activities and deal with them in away that preserve their honesty and credibility, but this cannot guarantee that all the reviews are 100% accurate and honest. Keep in mind: what fits with other users’ needs might not fit with your needs.

Search for “web hosting forum” in any search engine and you will get hundreds of them. My favorite one is www.webhostingtalk.com. Almost all forums have a search services from which you can search for your candidate hosting provider’s name or URL. If you get results for your search, read as much related threads as possible. If you don’t get results you can post a thread asking for customer reviews about the intended provider(s). Again, don’t base your final decision on one opinion. Read reviews in different threads on more than one forum.

Feedback from Customers
Some web hosts list samples of their customers. Others have forums on their websites for support, where you will see examples of issues raised by real customers and how did the company dealt with. On those forums you might get addresses of some customers. Try to contact those customers to find out what they think about the service and support.

At this point, you can make a decision based on a combination of the gathered information. You will most probably be satisfied with the host you choose.