Free hosting might sound like something very good. It is free and it allows you to host your website for free. If you use it you can build a website for free. I am here to tell you that free hosting is something that you should avoid and that free hosting can cost you a lot more then you think. Paid hosting can often be the cheaper option in the long run.
Below we are going to look at some of the reasons you should never choose free hosting. Please note that not everything I say below is true for every host. The only thing that is true for every free host is that you are better of choosing a paid one.
Not very good
Most free web hosts are not very good. They host a very large number of websites on servers that are not suitable for hosting so many websites. They do this to minimize their cost and maximize their profit. This causes websites hosted on free hosts to be slow and have high ping times. It is also common with downtime. Some free hosts are always slow. Other are only slow at peak times. Now you might be saying what is so bad about that. They are free. You can not expect everything from free hosting. That is true but if your website is slow and suffers from down time then this is going to affect what google and other search engines thinks about your website. they are not going to like it as much as they would if you used faster hosting and it might be a lot harder to get exposure in the search engine because your website get placed further down in the results. This makes it a lot harder to make your website successful. It makes it harder to get visitors. Bad hosting can cause your website to fail.
Limiting
It is very common that free hosting limits what you are allowed to do, which software you are allowed to use, which modifications you can make. This makes it a lot harder to build the website you want and can make it impossible to reach your goal.
Bad neighborhoods
It is very common that free hosts are used by scammers and spammers that are looking to build something as cheaply as possible and do not worry about the long term viability of their actions. They might end up registering 1000 of free accounts that they use to spam or build porn sites. It can be hard for the hosts to keep up with the spam and remove it. This might cause search engines to associate the IP your site is hosted on with spam. This in turn can hurt your website and make it impossible to rank it. It has become guilty by association. The risk for this is a lot smaller if you pay for hosting because no spammer wants to pay for accounts they know will be shut down.
Hard to move your site
A common problem with free hosts is that it can very hard to move your site to another host. Some free hosts make it impossible to move your site. Others require you to pay a fee to get the data you need to move it.
There are also a large number of hosts that do allow you to move your site but that make it rather difficult because. It is not a priority for them to make it easy. They prefer that you stay. You might have to do a lot of things manually to move your site.