Free Hosting for Your Website Might Actually Cost You More Money

Fantastic, you’re now an online business owner. You have just found your niche, your product, or your design and you now need to decide what your next step will be in building your website in order to promote it. You’ve even taken the necessary precautions by planning ahead. You’ve determined your target audience, their interests, and how and where to find them. And, in the process of all this, you’ve instilled a valuable, trusting relationship between them and you. They have decided doing business with you is just plain smart. You’ve also defined your main goals and have chosen the type of website that would best promote your product (dedicated sales page, single optin page, membership site, informational or brochure sites, journal website or blogs, portal sites - another article all together). And on top of all of that, you’ve picked out your domain name. Great, it sounds like you’re on your way to building a great business! One last thing needs to happen though. You need to choose a hosting company to set up your site and host it. The question really comes down to this, should I use a free hosting company or a paid one? My answer may surprise you. Avoid using free hosting at all costs. Below, I will give you some reasons as to why.

First of all, determine what tools and services the hosting company supports and which ones it does not. A few of the best I’ve come across are www.SuperHosting.com, www.Domains.com, and my favorite, www.CoolNetHosting.com, formerly known as WebHotMonkey.com. You get a lot more bang for your buck, as they say, with one of these compared to some others out there. Whichever you choose, make sure the measurement tools you are looking for are included in your package deal. Offered in their standard hosting packages, these tools include great web analytics technology. If you’re not sure what this consists of then look online for internet sites that explain it. There are even courses on this kind of stuff. Your hosting company should be able to track and analyze conversions and traffic for your site as well. The key is to get your software set up early then waiting to do it later. Remember, you are paying for this, so you should get what you think will promote your product the best.

Secondly, your hosting company needs to have a highly effective means of controlling spammers. This should be top priority due to the internet environment we live in today. However, with free hosting, spammers are not always treated as top priority. Since you’ll be sending and receiving emails via your host’s servers, make sure they have the necessary safeguards in place to deter spammers from using them to quick-start their own campaigns. The good thing is that Internet Service Providers, or the Internet Police as I call them, combat these spammers by blocklisting (also referred to as blacklisting) and/or penalizing these hosting companies that fail to use these safeguards. Unfortunately, some of the freebie hosting companies slide under the radar. So if you’re not a spammer, why worry? Again, unfortunately, most, if not all emails that originate from your hosting company’s server, this may include yours too, are blocked (spammer or not) and you never know it. To find out go to www.spamhaus.org. Here you can identify which hosting company you may want to stay away from by looking up their IP address.

Lastly, take a careful look at the reliability of the hosting company you’re considering. All experience cyberspace glitches, but by doing a little bit of research on your part, you can determine which companies are less likely to experience these glitches on their customer’s sites. These glitches may affect it by slowing or even worse, shutting down, your site. These glitches can occur often and may even last for hours or even days. You may want to google hosting companies that experience these types of things. Some of these search engine sites post past and present data on hosts reliability records. These are a great source of information that may help you decide on a host company.

As you can see, deciding on a hosting company can cause some heartaches. By weighing the pros and cons of the hosting company you’re considering, you can eliminate these heartaches. To recap, make sure your hosting company offers the measurement tools to operate your site the best. They must be tough on spammers by not allowing them to use your host’s server, and, last but not least, research the hosting company using search engines to see which ones are less likely to have cyberspace glitches. In addition to these things, don’t forget to avoid the free hosting companies. You may regret it if you do. You will definitely have a harder time finding people who are willing to link to your site and, get this, the host will place banner ads on your page that more likely will turn away visitors. Unhappy Visitors equals No Sales!