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When setting up a website, once you’ve chosen the right domain, one of the most important questions is: what sort of hosting should you choose?
After all, without hosting, there can be no website, and although most providers now combine domain name registration with the purchase of web hosting, many people still find it difficult to navigate the various options.
When it comes to hosting, we can choose between free and paid options, which is no coincidence: both have their own specific functions, and both are ideal in the right circumstances; however, to make the right choice, we need to know exactly when to opt for which type.
What characteristics does a good web hosting service have?
Regardless of whether you choose a free or paid option, when it comes to web hosting, it is important to be aware of the features you should consider before making a decision.
The hallmark of good web hosting is a high level of uptime, ensuring that both the website it hosts and the associated email system are accessible 24 hours a day, every day of the year. It is particularly important for a business that its official website is always accessible, as downtime usually results in financial losses.
It is also important that a web hosting service is fast, meaning it can load web pages at an acceptable speed on both mobile devices and computers. Obviously, this does not depend solely on the hosting service, but also on the website itself. However, that is a matter for another discussion altogether.
Furthermore, a good web hosting service is capable of meeting all the needs we might have in relation to our website; in other words, it is feature-rich – that is, secure, reliable, handles our email and supports every option we might need to ensure our success.
A poorly chosen web hosting service can therefore very easily become an enemy to both ourselves and our business, so it is worth taking due care when making a decision.
The pros and cons of paid and free web hosting
Many people, even as business owners, consider trying to save money on their website by opting for free hosting. Whilst this is by no means always a bad decision, in most cases it is not the best option for a company.
Free web hosting services
When it comes to free web hosting, the biggest problem is the compromises involved. In most cases, the majority of providers view this option merely as a kind of entry-level service, which is ideal for trying out the system and testing your skills, but for a successful business – or one striving for success – this is simply not enough.
Furthermore, free web hosting services always come with a host of restrictions, so if, for example, we needed a feature-rich website, we wouldn’t be able to create one using such a service.
That said, with free web hosting, we can always find ourselves in a very vulnerable position, as the provider may decide at any time to change the terms of the free service, impose further restrictions on features, display adverts on the site, or even limit our own advertising options.
In the latter case, we may end up missing out on far more revenue than we would pay for a suitable web hosting service. Of course, it’s worth pointing out here that free web hosting is often a good choice too!
As well as being free and allowing you to test its features, this type of hosting is ideal in any situation where you simply want to create a non-profit portfolio site, or perhaps you’re still a private individual and aren’t quite sure whether your idea will develop into a business in the future or not.
It can be an option even for a start-up online shop if you don’t have any start-up capital: this way, you can try your hand at e-commerce without spending a lot, and once the business is up and running, you can move on to a paid plan. However, this is never a long-term solution.
It’s also a good idea to choose free hosting for search engine optimisation projects and experiments, but it’s equally ideal for creating satellite sites or learning the ins and outs of website creation.
The limitations of free hosting
Before opting for free hosting, it’s worth being aware of the typical trade-offs:
- The domain isn’t free here either. With many free services, you only get a subdomain containing the provider’s name (for example,
nevem.szolgaltato.com), which isn’t ideal if you want to look more professional. To use your own domain name, you need to register it separately and renew it annually. - Very limited resources. The storage, processor time and traffic are generally only sufficient for a basic, low-traffic website.
- Limited services and support. Often, only certain applications can be run, and support is limited or non-existent, as we aren’t paying for it.
- There are no backups, or very few. If the site breaks or is hacked, there may not be anything to restore it from.
- Advertisements and uncertainty. Some free service providers place their own adverts on our site and may modify or discontinue the free service at any time.
We have a separate article that discusses the hidden costs of free hosting in detail.
Free web hosting with aWh: Web Free
Web Free is not a trial version, but a fully-fledged, free plan for smaller websites: among our web hosting plans, it offers 1 GB of NVMe SSD storage, a dedicated domain, an email account and a database, with a free SSL certificate and the same KeyHelp control panel as our paid plans. Backups are not included, but if your website outgrows this plan, you can upgrade to a larger plan at any time without having to perform a migration.
Paid web hosting services
With a paid web hosting service, you can forget about all the above drawbacks entirely. If you run your own business, or if you want to earn money from your website – whether directly or indirectly – then you need to choose a web hosting service that covers all your needs.
If we pay for hosting, we can effectively have complete control; we don’t have to worry about adverts or other restrictions, we can manage the available storage space ourselves, and we can even link multiple domains to a single hosting account, meaning we can run several websites from it.
This can save you a great deal, particularly if you run several businesses or have business partners with whom you can share both the storage space and the associated costs.
The advantage of paid hosting is that we can always determine its size and functionality ourselves; so if we need 10GB because we want to run our own email system alongside our website, there’s nothing to stop us, as we can create multiple email accounts with this type of hosting.
For this reason, in the case of corporate clients or more established service providers, only paid hosting is an option, as using it makes both our business’s online presence and its operations appear far more serious and professional.