Hosting

Free vs Paid Web Hosting: What’s the Difference?

Introduction

In this advancing technological era, every web business, from small to big, needs to establish a website. This has highly raised the demand for web hosting services. While broadly categorizing web hosting services, you can find paid hosting and free hosting in the web hosting industry. Many startups, new website owners, and small business owners obviously remain fascinated by the concept of free web hosting. This helps them to minimize the overall investment in running and managing websites. However, you must analyze and determine what is most competent for your website based on the various key factors and necessities. To help you with the same, in this article, we will provide you with insights into the crucial differences between Free vs Paid Web Hosting. 

Comparison between Free Hosting vs Paid Hosting

Comparison between Free Hosting vs Paid Hosting

Here are the major aspects based on which we have highlighted the difference between free hosting and paid hosting. Have a glance at them to be able to comprehend both types of hosting well. 

Reliability 

Reliability is among the most prominent aspects, which must be considered when comparing free vs paid web hosting. In general, you will not find the same uptime with the free web hosting platforms that paid web hosting companies render. The reason behind this is the unavailability of high-grade server infrastructure in the free web hosting, which is needed to acquire a website’s good uptime and high-speed performance. So, free web hosting will eventually make you experience downtime with your website in some instances. Or, it might not be capable of handling and managing the traffic spikes on your website. 

Search Engine Rankings

Every web business attempts to acquire a better and higher search engine ranking for its website. They need to count on each factor that is responsible for influencing the search engine rankings of your website. With free website hosting, your providers can run unrelated ads or unprofessional links on your website, which directly affects the development of your website. Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that numerous spammers utilize free web hosting for building dummy websites. All of such things come to the notice of the search engines and thus, can adversely affect your website’s search engine rankings. Whereas, web businesses operating their websites on paid hosting do not encounter these issues at all. Thus, they have a much higher opportunity to obtain the best possible search engine rankings and reputed online visibility.

Bandwidth And Storage Space

Renowned and industry-leading web hosting companies like Hostbillo offers an extensive range of web hosting plans with varied bandwidth and storage space. Thus, with paid web hosting, you can choose the aptest package based on your website’s necessities. However, you get very limited bandwidth and storage space for your website with free web hosting. Initially, your website might function well with the limited bandwidth and storage space. But as it will grow or when you will be required to unload or transfer media files, things get challenging for you with limited hosting resources.  

Support and Assistance

You will rarely acquire instant or immediate support from your free web hosting provider for any technical issues that you might face while hosting your website. Moreover, if you do not possess enough technical expertise or a technical support team, you remain occupied amidst the technical issues rather than having your focus on growing your website. Also, for websites that function with MySQL databases, PHP, Pearl, and other such scripts, a lack of technical support can become a significant issue. On the other side, you acquire the guarantee of 24/7 technical assistance with paid hosting services to run your web business smoothly and hassle-free.

Customized Error Pages

The free web hosting platform does not enable you to build customized error pages. These error pages are employed to let your website’s visitors know if there is some error occurring. For instance, if the visitor enters the wrong URL of your website page or attempts to browse a page that is not available on the website, customized error pages let them know about the issue. However, in the free web hosting service, your website’s visitor will see the web hosting company’s stock error page whenever any error occurs. And, they will not be able to obtain any directions in order to locate what they want. Consequently, they will get gobbled up and leave your website. 

On the other hand, this is not the case when you host your website on a paid hosting server. The paid web hosting provides you complete access to your website and your hosting account. You get the right to design customized error pages. So, you can redirect your website’s visitors to some other page of your website or make them explore your web business further if any error occurs. This way, you do not lose your website’s visitors easily.

Website Building

You get the possibility to create your website on both free and paid web hosting platforms. However, you must note that with the free web hosting platform, you need to confine yourself to the fundamental attributes and features for building your website. Also, you will have to limit yourself when it comes to designing the website’s functionalities of your website. Whereas, with the professional paid web hosting service, you will obtain a website builder tool or a CMS such as Joomla, Magento, WordPress, etc. to design your website the way you desire. Moreover, it will let you have simplified ways for the entire process of website design with no restrictions. 

Website Security

Website Security is very crucial and it is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing between Free vs Paid Web Hosting. There is a high chance that your hosting provider will not take any responsibility when it comes to your website’s security with the free web hosting service. Whereas with paid hosting services, you can have multiple security layers implemented by your web hosting provider for your website’s data. Further, reliable and well-known web hosting companies make sure to let your website have protection from all outside security threats. We at Hostbillo render full assurance of your website’s security by rendering advanced security features, including DDoS protection, SSL certificate, data encryption, and backup services. 

Conclusion 

So, in the end, we can say that when we compare Free vs Paid Web Hosting, the Free option may sound good for a while, but you must take all the factors into consideration when it comes to the long-term growth of your website. You can save a bit more money with free web hosting, but you can encounter small issues getting bigger with time. This will further result in consuming more time and money. Also, the free web hosting service is not really free as its provider charges for your hosting account and runs ads on your website in order to earn. You should be ready to take the risk of a competitor’s ad or any other inappropriate ad on your site while picking for free web hosting service.

Further, for the paid hosting service you must pick the web hosting company, which knows the entire website management and can provide you access to all hosting privileges and benefits. No doubt, it is always better to go for a leading and recognized web hosting company that charges you for the hosting services and renders the best web hosting solutions. Connect right away with the Hostbillo experts to know about our cheap hosting plans with hyper-scale and intense facilities.

Arpit Saini

He is the Chief Technology Officer at Hostbillo Hosting Solution and also follows a passion to break complex tech topics into practical and easy-to-understand articles. He loves to write about Web Hosting, Software, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and much more.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *