Deciding between a free and paid host is an important decision, affecting both your wallet and the quality of service you will receive.

A free web hosting service allows people to create and publish their websites without any cost.

In general, a free web hosting service has following advantages:


Does not cost anything to obtain and maintain service.
A good place to start for people who are new to web designing, PHP and HTML. You are able to learn how to build a website for free.
Sometimes it is a better to start with free service for testing purposes. When everything is ready for public you may switch to paid service for better performance and reliability.
A typical free host provides a lot of tutorials and site building tools, enabling people to build their sites very easily without any technical knowledge.
Depending on the company, a new website can be easy created with ready-to-use templates almost instantly.
A lot of free hosting providers have their own online forum, where a new member can interact with other members who share similar interest.
New members can also get technical help and advice from other members of their forums.


Generally, a free hosting service has some significant limitations compared to a paid hosting service. Some of the common disadvantages are discussed below:


Most free web hosting providers will place forced advertisements (banner and pop-ups) on users' websites.
The amount of web space provided by a free host is usually very low.
Very small monthly quota of bandwidth (data transfer rate).
Usually free accounts are placed on crowded servers with low performance.
Most free hosting providers put restrictions on file types. People are not allowed to use certain types of files on their site (for example MP3, MPEG, ZIP etc.)
Also there are limitations on the size of each hosted file.
Due to different restrictions and limited features it is very hard (even impossible) to create a site with advanced functionality.
People often find it hard to generate revenue from their free hosting site by serving advertisements from different advertising networks because most major ad networks usually do not allow free websites to participate in their ad campaigns.
Do not provide any uptime guarantee. As a result the downtime experienced by a free hosting account is sometimes longer than paid hosting accounts.
Some free hosts require posting in a forum.
Most free hosting providers do not offer any direct customer support for their free hosting services.
Do not forget - you will get what you pay for.


Sometimes equipment does break down. You want to know that somebody will be there to fix it. So before made a decision it is important to ask yourself following questions:

Do you really want something for free, or do you want a good, stable environment for you and your visitors with good and friendly support?

Is support available around the clock? If so, will you have access to a live person at any hour, or merely an answering machine that promises to relay your concerns to the support staff?

In case you are an advanced user, may want to check the details like control panel used, PHP and MySQL version etc.

By and large, experts say, service and support will be the most significant issues for anybody looking for web hosting. I really like when the support team is always on the phone. Although opening a ticket is better for advanced questions I prefer a phone call. It is real time and easier to communicate.

Tech support and uptime is what most customers seem to want. Uptime guarantees do not mean much compared to just plain having them online. They want the servers up and running and support when needed.

After all, a state-of-the-art webhosting center is its own building, with its own security. It has a battery backup plus diesel generators, plus all the equipment, plus the staff. There are huge expenses, and they have to make that back somehow.