Difference Between Free And Paid
Web Hosting Service

These days everyone from small business owners, start-ups and new entrepreneurs get attracted to the concept of web hosting. The fact is everyone today needs a website and choosing between free and the paid web hosting is one of the first dilemmas they face. People even choose free web hosting as it minimizes the overall cost to some extent. With free and paid web hosting, you cannot simply decide on what is best for you. You have to learn about each term and their differences to choose the best web hosting service.

Free and paid web hosting: Key differences 

Many of the features that you have to look at in a web host are easy to differentiate. But knowing how to get the best one for you might be quite challenging. Some of the factors like web hosting success, search engine optimization and customer support are easy to overlook. Here are certain features listed below with which you can examine the free and the paid web hosting services. 

Reliability

Reliability is one of the most striking factors that compare the free and paid web hosting services. In general, free web hosting will not provide the same uptime as that of the paid web hosting platforms. To provide a good uptime and speed to the websites a proper server infrastructure is required. 

span style=”font-weight: 400;”>If you choose a free web hosting platform, at some instances you might experience downtime to your website. Also in certain circumstances, a free web hosting platform might not be capable of handling the traffic. This results in a slow website and this indicates loss of customers.

 Most of the paid web hosting services are professional and guarantee 99% uptime which can uplift your business website.

Search engine rankings

Reaching a higher search engine ranking is one of the goals of every business. But it is important to understand that certain factors affect your search engine rankings. Some of the free web hosting providers display irrelevant ads or unnecessary links on your website. This may affect your website hugely. All these are noticed by the search engines and can adversely affect your search engine rankings. 

With the paid web hosting services you can never encounter these issues. Therefore you can have a better search engine ranking and also with reputed online visibility.

Bandwidth and storage space

With professional web hosting providers you get a wide array of web hosting packages. All these packages come with different variations of bandwidth and storage space. With these, you can choose the best one that suits your website requirements.

You get very limited bandwidth and storage space with the free web hosting platforms. Everything might look to be fine in the beginning if you opt for a free web hosting package but this does not remain the same when your website grows. Things like transfer video files, photos or other files will start getting difficult. Your website will often face issues.

Support and assistance

It is very hard to get immediate support for the technical issues from the free hosting providers. Because of this, you might have to deal with many technical and customer-related issues. This can reduce your focus on your business growth.

With the paid hosting platforms you can get 24/7 technical support. They also make your work easier and hassle-free.

Customized error pages

Creating customized error pages with the free web hosting platform is not applicable. The web server utilizes the error pages and this lets the visitor know that there is an error when the visitor types the wrong URL or any page that is not present on the website. When it comes to the free web hosting the stock error page will be displayed but this will not give any directions to the visitors for what they are looking for. As a result, the visitor will get confused and they will leave your website.

With the paid web hosting service, this is not the case. The paid hosting platform will provide complete control over your website and account. With this, you can design the customized error pages for your visitors. This will display an error page when your visitor is trying to access a wrong page or URL. As a result, you will not lose your visitor.

Website speed

One of the most important aspects is the speed when it comes to web hosting service. This factor is very critical as it retains the customers today. No one wants and likes to wait for a slow website as there are many alternatives today.

 In free web hosting, a website will load very slowly as a free web hosting account doesn’t provide enough resources for the website to function. With this, if a customer tries to access something, it will take a lot of time for them to get what they want. In such cases, you will lose your customers. The better alternative for such a problem is investing in a paid web hosting platform as it will provide good page load speed.

Website building

Website building can be done on both a free web hosting platform and paid web hosting platform. With the free web hosting platform, there are many restrictions to the basic attributes that play a major role in creating your website. Also, you will face some limitations in creating the functionalities of your website.

A paid web hosting platform will have the inbuilt tools and this allows you to easily design your website as you wish. Overall the complete process of designing your website is simple with the paid web hosting platform as there is no limitation.

Website security

Many free web hosting companies are not responsible for website security. In such cases, there are chances for you to lose data along with your customers.

If you want to safeguard your website, it is good to opt for a paid web hosting provider as they take complete responsibility for your website security.

The bottom lines

Understanding all the points given above, it is you who want to think about choosing the right web hosting service. Many of them think that opting for a free web hosting service saves them a lot of money but with time you might find a lot of issues. With the paid web hosting services, you need not spend a lot of money. Think and choose the best web hosting service that satisfies your requirements.