Look Before you Leap into Free Web Hosting

There are many options available to us these days for free web hosting. Before you leap into a free hosting site there are things to consider. Building and promoting a website takes time, and you can lose many good features by choosing the wrong host.

Think about the purpose of your website. Do you want community? Want to stay in touch with your friends? Then you should check out Facebook and Myspace. These sites are social networking sites. There are many of these sites operating today, so check with your friends to see where they are already hosted.

Having an online photo album is another good reason to start a website. There are many photo posting resources available these days, such as Flicker.

Most of the free web space hosts have additional features to enhance and customize your website, such as templates for the appearance. Add on features include features like linking, photo upload, and comment sections where others can remark on your postings.

There is yet another level to free web hosting that many of these free sites do not allow, and that is the display of ads. Sure, you can talk about something you offer, and provide links to other sites, but many have it in their sign up that commercial sites are not allowed. Some do allow Google Adsense, such as the Blogspot site now owned by Google.

One of the disadvantages of a free web space is the name of your website. Though you will have a little creative latitude on a portion of the name, it will always contain your free web space domain name as well. One example of this is http://atravel-adventure.blogspot.com. The host domain is blogspot, with the subdomain atravel-adventure.

Depending on the type of site you want to have, you may have to think about paid hosting. For example, if you want your own domain name, like http://afreewebspace.com, , you will need to find a hosting site and purchase your domain name. Having your own host gives you more control as to the design and features of your site. One options is using a content management system, which we will talk about in the next article in this series.

If you find that the free web space hosting you have is not going to serve you for your new ideas and creative endeavors, you can always create your next site elsewhere and put links to your new site on the free hosting site. This way your people can follow you, and the search engines will find you much easier.

The best thing about free web hosting is that your photos and ideas are safe in the event you have a computer crash or other data catastrophe. While not meant to be a data storage space, you can always retrieve your photos from your online space.

Having a free web space is easy, and the best part is that it is free! Have a little fun with the idea, and check out some of the hosting spaces we have discussed in this article. Make your presence known!