One thing that seems popular is for some webmasters to start off with their first website or blog on free web hosting, of course for blogging there are a number of free blogging services like blogger and wordpress where everything is already in place and setting up can literally take just a matter of minutes, this is good for someone with little or no knowledge of how to begin setting up websites and it makes being a webmaster accessible to everyone.

Well the next stage for some people is to use a free hosting service where you are not restricted to using a particular platform, like in the above example of blogger, wordpress or a similar service.

With some of these free hosting services you have the freedom (within reason) to setup allsorts of websites and since an individual may not want to pay for web hosting yet, especially if they are still in the experimental stage then this makes a lot of sense for many.

There can be a number of restrictions, after all, nothing is truely free, and if a service is being offered for free then you know that in virtually all cases there has to be a least a minor benefit to the individual or company who offers the service to others.

Some of these restrictions are going to be a limit on storage space and bandwidth, so if you are considering setting up a website with a free hosting service then naturally you would want to read what storage limits they have set, next is going to be the bandwidth restrictions, now these are not exclusive to free hosting services, as any web hosting package,  whether free or paid  needs to set limits because the bandwidth needs to be paid for by someone and so it cant be limitless.

Another factor to keep in mind will be the use of databases, often the use of a MySQL database and PHP, a free web host may provide you with database use but it will be restricted, what is meant by that is that the priviledge settings will not be set to give you full control over the database, this is understandable with the service being free, but it may get in the way of your plans for your website.

If you know that you wont want or need database use with full priviledges then this is not a concern for you, but if you do need full access to the database then this will naturally be something to think about before setting up your website with a free host.

Some services are going to show advertising on the webpages and this can be seen as acceptable for many people but if you know that you wont want the web hosts advertisements in place anywhere that it may be worth looking at a few of the other free services to see if they can offer a similar service without the ads.

Talking of advertisements, you may be intending to run a few advertisements of your own as a publisher from some of the various affiliate programs out there so its worth checking the details of the free hosting service to see if they will allow you to display your own ads on the pages, some will and some wont allow this, its just a matter of looking around to see what one suits your needs the best.

Well for now ive covered some of the basics to keep in mind when deciding on whether to use a free web hosting service or not and what one to choose if you do. I will cover other factors to keep in mind in posts in the near future but for now you have some basics to go on and to think about while you look for any free web hosting services.

The good thing is that there are many to choose from, some will be better than others and some will probably last longer than others, as long as you work out what you need from them first and understand that they must set resrictions like any service then they can be useful as a stepping stone in the world of becomming and being a webmaster.

Filed under: Free Web Hosting by admin Published May 24, 2008