If you’re going to set up a small website with no special intentions of it going huge in the nearby future you probably want to spend as little money as possible on it. What if I said that you can get free website hosting, would you believe me? Well, it’s actually true and it’s a hosting form that’s growing as a competitor to the shared web hosting package. Let’s take a look at what it is and how come it can be offered for free.

About Free Website Hosting

Hosting services that are free will almost always be supported by advertisements. Providers of this form of hosting will generally provide you with either a subdomain or a directory. Not all, but many, of the free hosting providers will allow you to use a domain name that you’ve purchased separately.

If you’ve searched on the web for free hosting then you’ve probably noticed that far from the majority of web hosts offer free hosting. Those who do are specialized in making money from companies that wish to put up their ads on the host’s clients sites. The revenue from these ads is supposed to cover all hosting expenses and, of course, also make it all profitable for the hosting provider. As time goes by the users can upgrade their account for a small fee and hence get much more features.

Free web hosting will obviously come with some limitations when it comes to the hosting package. Some that could be worth mentioning are small bandwidth per month, no uptime guarantee (something that could be quite disturbing), file type restrictions (no Zip and MP3 upload for example) and limitations in size of each hosted file. If you already now know that you won’t be able to work with these regulations you could take a look at shared web hosting.

Shared Web Hosting – The Next Step

Shared web hosting will offer you much more of everything and still be a very affordable form of hosting. As the name gives away is shared hosting a form where you split a server with several other sites making it a very cost efficient alternative. For only a few dollars a month you’ll get plenty of disk space, bandwidth and free domains. Almost all shared hosts also promise a 99.9% uptime guarantee which means that you won’t have to worry about missing out on the action.

Both alternatives will be kind on your budget – your decision should be based on what your needs are. If you need a somewhat more stabile hosting, pick shared hosting, and if you just want something really simple and don’t care about ads on your pages, pick free website hosting.