You’ve got everything ready. You just need to upload your website to a reliable host. However, you are on the fence about taking out your credit card to pay a hosting company a monthly fee. Actually, you are also on the fence about using a free host. Is it reliable? What should you do? Read on, as we are going to explore the pros and cons of each type of hosting.

Free Hosting

The Good:

It’s free! With some search you can come across a nice free hosting company. Besides, why would you pay for just uploading some family photos on the web?

One thing I like to do with free hosting is to test out stuffs. If I want to test a piece of code, I do it with my free hosting account. This way, my paid hosting account stays clean.

The Bad:

Free hosting is most of the time not reliable. It provides no back-up feature and anytime your website can be deleted without notice, for no reason. Most free hosting companies also put banner ads on top of your website and have slow loading time. While this is not really a huge problem for a personal website, it WILL make your website look unprofessional and unappealing to people if you are using it commercially.

On top, when you do decide to upgrade to paid hosting, you are often asked to pay $30 + a month when you could have paid $5 only if you went the paid way in the very beginning.

Paid Hosting

The Good:

Reliable. Most paid hosts guarantee 99.9% uptime and this is usually true. No ad is displayed on your site – only what you put on is there. And the loading speed only depends on the surfer’s internet connection speed. You have the flexibility to install WordPress or other CMS with Fantastico (a script which makes it extremely easy and fast to install stuffs on your domain if you are not tech-savvy). Costs less than $5 a month if you are just starting out.

The Bad:

Not free.

Also, if you want to get your website online for commercial purposes, then you should know that it’s not very common to see free hosting providers’ subdomains rank high in the search engines. So do yourself a favour and get that cheap hosting to have a peace of mind :)