Web hosting is a large topic on the web. Everyone talks about it as a temporary way to make a website work. Newbies, especially, think that free hosting can help them achieve their goals and succeed in their projects. But the truth is completely different.
The reason is simple, there is no such thing called free hosting when it comes to professional use. If a company allows you to save a few files on their server, then, make sure that it’s just for fun and not for serious webmasters and business owners. In this post, I’ll tell you why you should never use those useless services and how they can impact your entire website.
Why should we never use free hosting?
If you want to start a new site or business, you should think about good hosting and not those who divide the same server with thousands of sites. To understand why these companies are useless, ask yourself, how they can host sites on secure and fast servers, without any investment.
Old and slow servers are overloaded all the time
The new server costs lots of money, and if you add the maintenance and the configurations, that costs more, and a simple company needs to invest thousands of dollars on these servers only. If you add more things like customer support and add-ons, the company needs millions of dollars to work.
What these services are doing is using outdated hardware that no one uses and hosting your site with them. The result is not only a very slow site but also, a very dangerous environment and high risk. You can lose all your site content in a matter of seconds.
No daily automatic backups
The last thing that a site owner needs is to lose the content and find himself without a copy to restore it. There is no backup service with these free services.
The backup needs software that costs money and lots of settings, but also, they need to make a large disk space to save those backups. And, of course, they can’t offer that server, simply, because they don’t care about you.
They don’t have customer support
Customer support is not an icon to use on their sites, just to make you think they are professional. These hosting providers want your money, and they can do everything to get it. So, you need to be smart from the beginning.
A few technicians for the customer support department cost the company a fortune. If there are thousands of hosted sites, then, imagine how the company pays those employees. But, the truth is simple, there is no customer support at all, and they can just put numbers or something else to attract people.
The support is the most important element in every hosting. Problems should be solved in a few minutes, if not instantly, and no one of these services can do that for you.
Not a registered business
This may seem not important, especially for people who just need a new account, and that’s it. However, you need to know if you’re hosting your site with a registered business or not. If a hosting company is registered and trusted, that means lots of things.
They have the right infrastructure to host domains without issues. At the same time, they have the resources and the technology to make your site load normally, at least, and make it as secure as possible. Also, they have the team and the human resources to help you when you need them. That’s why good hosting should be a registered business, first.
It’s not about limitations only, but also security
We all know that these companies who offer free hosting are just attracting new people, to market their premium plans, later. In other words, they use the free account as a reason to send you offers and bombard you with emails.
If you’re lucky, they will make your site load in a way that no one would open another page, and leave the site forever. That way, you will not only lose people, but also, you will lose all your hard work, and there’s nothing as a result.
If you read the Google webmaster guidelines, you will notice that security is the first thing to have, in order to be indexed. Billions of people use that search engine to find what they need online, and they don’t need sites without protection.
Every site is an easy target for hackers, and everyone can play with its files. But, when your hosting provider protects its infrastructure and hardens the access to the server, things will be secure in general. Of course, you should add some plugins or settings in WordPress or any other type of website.
There are thousands of cases every week, where blogs and sites have been added to the blacklist of Google, Bing, and all over the web. It’s a result of malicious code that hackers can put on these sites without any notice.
Of course, they work to add spam links and codes to your website as well, and you can’t protect yourself on free hosting. The only thing that you can do there is just wait for your site to be down and removed from the Google index completely.
Then, if you want to recover or remove those codes, or even files, you will need to spend lots of time and money to make the site clean again. Even with that hard work, you can’t guarantee that your site gets re-indexed again and removed from that blacklist of spam or vulnerable sites.
All the way, free hosting is the first source of viruses and attacks on your site. You can’t protect your site because the server itself is open to everyone, and there is no way to stay safe there.
If you want to start a professional site, use a hosting that cares about it, and make it load faster than the others. Business-class hosting like HostGator offers the best service for all sizes of sites. They’re the only provider who uses SSD on all their servers, and that’s what makes them a fast hosting.
At the same time, they have an auto-installer for over 300 applications like WordPress and Joomla, but also, all the others. When it comes to customer support, this company has a U.S.-based team, and it’s the best without a doubt. If you need premium hosting only, then, I recommend WP Engine, it’s a fully managed hosting for WordPress sites only, and everything is optimized especially for that application.
