Free Host

Before you start searching for a web host, you must familiarize yourself with the terminology used in this field. The following terms are also considered key factors in deciding the suitable hosting plan that meets your requirements. You can start learning what does each term mean and how does it affect your selection.

Web Host

A web host, also known as web server, is a computer connected to the internet. This computer is more powerful than normal PCs and is set up to serve up websites. Your website content will reside on this computer, which will give people who surf the internet a way to access your website.

Web hosts can be categorized into three main categories based on the price range and common features for each category:

1. Free Hosts: limited in space, bandwidth and other features. Suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Usually enforce pop-up, text or banner ads. They do not provide the best performance and/or reliability. They provide minimum or no customer support. If you register for a free host, your domain will be something like yourname.freehost.com or http://www.freehost.com/yourname.

2. Shared Hosts: most websites are using this type of hosting. Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. Prices range from $1 to about $25 a month. Features also range from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. Your website has its own top level domain (e.g. http://www.website-hostings.net) The number of websites on a server affects its performance and availability, more websites usually means less performance. Servers hosting less number of shared websites are more expensive, but more reliable. Some companies allow customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.

3. Dedicated Hosts: A full server dedicated to a single customer. Usually used by large businesses and very active websites with thousands of daily visitors. The customer will have full control over the server, and can create as many websites as he likes. Customer can have his own hosting company run on a rented dedicated server. Prices depend on the specifications and services provided with the server, starting from about $100 up to about $800 dollars a month.

4. Colocated Hosts: very similar to dedicated hosts, but the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. The server will be housed in provider’s data center. Prices are a bit higher than dedicated servers.

5. Reseller Hosts: providers offer web server storage to customers, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Providers usually offer resellers a discount price.

6. Other Hosts: there are few other types of hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these are out of the scope of this article.

Domain Name

www.website-hostings.net is an example of a domain name. It’s a name that points to where your website is physically located. The actual address of your website is a set of numbers that looks like (70.86.135.242). This address is unique for every web server. Domain names are just pointers to the real addresses. It’s easier to remember the domain names than the IP addresses.

Space / Storage

The amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s website files, images and databases. It can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Space prices reduced significantly during the last few years. Customer can find hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from web server to clients’ internet browsers. Each time a person view a page data is transmitted from the server to that person’s PC. Audio, video and images contents consume much more bandwidth than text. Bandwidth can be as low as 100MB a month in some free web hosts and as high as 2000GB a month in some dedicated servers. Customer can find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.

Server Type

Usually means the operating system than runs the web server. Common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type determines the server side scripting and database types. Windows usually runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases. Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with mySQL or Oracle databases. Windows servers are usually more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.

Databases

As you have seen in server types, there are different types of databases. The most commonly used is mySQL because its an open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, however, has some limitations in its features. Complicated large business sites will need more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

Server Side Scripting

Most new users prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that can meet a lot of webmaster’s requirements. Similar to mySQL, PHP has some limitations in features required by advanced websites, which makes some senior web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Most hosting plans include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain (e.g. admin@website-hostings.net). The number and size of email accounts depends on the hosting plan. Free plans do not usually have this feature, small plans give about 10 accounts where big plans do not limited the number. Those email accounts are usually web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

A standard way of transferring files across the Internet. Most webmasters upload and download their websites contents using FTP. The upload or download processes are usually performed using FTP client software. To access their web servers, webmasters need FTP username and password. Some hosts give more than one FTP account to their customers. FTP can by anonymous as well, but its not recommended for security reasons.

Discover how to go about choosing a Top Web Hosting Providers, to get information about Host Gator Web Hosting Review you must read Web Hosting Reviews And Ratings here.

YWhen talking about free anything the legitimate question that first pops into your mind is why pay when you can get it free?

And as for free web hosting there are plenty of places to get it from.

As spread as they are, if you are not a stranger to the whole Internet experience, you might even have a web site hosted for free. Are you satisfied with your provider? Is it everything you wanted? Probably not. Anyway it is true that is comes with no cost and no other aggravations… or are there any?

Free web hosting cost no money but what can you expect from one?

Your web site will be turned into an advertising machine that works for the free web host. Expect, banners, pop up windows, frames. They will all mess the look of your web site in terms of design and accessibility for your visitors that might be literally flooded with popups almost after every click-through.

You can’t make advertising revenue of your web site, as most free web hosts don’t allow it. This is not such a big issue when you are maintaining a personal web site, but the cutting-off advertising revenues can mean significant losses for a business. For this last case, only a paid web hosting solution might be the right answer.

Very little space for your web pages. With free web hosting provider offering 5 to 15 MB of disk space, your site’s expansion will severely restricted. Growing your web site above the offered quota would result in transferring to a paid plan offered by the same hosting provider or finding a different paid web-hosting provider. In both cases you end paying for your hosting and you might loose traffic to your web site due to changing hosts.

No online store can go without secure server to enable secure online credit card processing. The great majority of free hosts don’t support secure web servers. Customers fearing fraud and concerned about their personal information will make it impossible, at least very hard for an online store to survive on a free host. And anyway, have you ever heard of a successful online store hosted by a free web host? None will hear from yours either.

The uptime of your web site will be like the weather forecast. Hope for good, but prepare for the worse. Downtime through free web hosts is unfortunately very common. As web hosts generate their revenues from advertising, they don’t feel very much compelled to care for the web site of a subscriber who doesn’t pay them anyway.

To whom will you turn when experiencing the abovementioned downtime or other technical problem with your web site? Free web hosts usually have a limited budget and don’t afford to hire large customer support teams, if any. You will find yourself alone, staring at the FAQ page.

Your domain name will be measured in feet and will tell nothing or very little of your business. This obviously results in low traffic scores, as your visitors won’t be able to remember your URL. Can you rely only on search engines, linked sites and people bookmarking your web site? If yes, at least consider the fact that in the age when companies try to create a personalized image, your web site will be condemned to be just another subdomain of your free host.

Will your customers trust a business hosted by a free web host? What credibility will your web site inspire? Not a very high one.

The above list is really rather long, but as surprisingly as it might be, it is far from being complete. Other additions to it could be that free web hosts not always offer FTP access to your web site file, or you only have one e-mail address to work with and probably looks like mysite@anotherfreeserver.com.

Yes, paid web hosting requires money, but the prices are lower than they used to be, and the advantages are rather impressive. Just turn all the above you can’t… or you have to do without… list around.

You are searching for a solution to host your business or even a professional personal web site, don’t look for it at a free web host.

Discover how to go about choosing a Top Web Hosting Providers, to get information about Host Gator Web Hosting Review you must read Web Hosting Reviews And Ratings here.

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