6 Reasons Why Free Unlimited Web Hosting Might Not Be Great

free webhosting

Did you know that “free” sometimes costs way too much?

Many internet users are attracted to the idea of free unlimited web hosting. They often think it is a great solution for hosting website materials or simply storing personal files.

However, this “free” hosting comes with a number of drawbacks. To understand these drawbacks, you must understand more about the hosting itself.

What Is Free Unlimited Web Hosting?

Free unlimited web hosting is an online service allowing you to store unlimited files. Instead of charging a monthly or annual fee, this service is offered free of charge.

This sounds like a great idea at first. However, a number of unpleasant strings are attached to this free service.

How Is It Possible?

To make this service possible, hosting services have to cut many corners. This can result in a number of limitations that ruin your experience of hosting files.

These limitations also threaten to ruin the browsing experience of visitors to your website. This can affect your bottom line if you are trying to generate revenue with your website.

Ironically, revenue is the cause of many of the problems associated with this hosting service.

The Profit Motive

Those offering free unlimited web hosting are still out to make a profit. This means that your experiences may be compromised so they can make money.

There may be hidden restrictions on things like data transfer. These restrictions add up and mean that you end up regretting the experience.

Before you try free unlimited web hosting, you must understand these six key reasons why it isn’t great at all.

1. Annoying Advertisements

The most popular way for free hosting services to offset their costs is advertisements. These advertisements are placed on your websites whether you want them or not.

Ads may be placed on the sides of your sites or on the top or bottom of your pages.

Hosting services typically make an effort to put relevant advertisements on your sites. However, this may result in your websites helping to advertise your competitors!

This means you not only drive customers away, but you drive them into the competition’s arms.

2. Middleman Woes

Sometimes, the deal really does sound too good to be true. This may be the case when you are dealing with salespeople instead of experts at the hosting services.

Some web hosts turn to sales agents to help re-package and re-sell bundles of services. This may result in attractive offers such as free hosting.

Keep in mind you may not be able to contact the web hosting service directly. This will make it difficult to troubleshoot problems or even to customize the site to your liking.

3. Too Many Limitations

Part of the joy of designing your own website is getting everything to look just right. Free unlimited web hosting interferes with this by extremely limiting your options.

You will lack a good selection of e-commerce tools that are offered by paid web hosting services. You will likely not have access to control panels or other methods of directly administrating your sites.

Finally, your site will be created from a limited range of existing templates. This makes it difficult to customize the look and feel of the site. It also ensures your website looks very similar to others, making it appear generic.

4. Bad Customer Support

Those running a website must be fully prepared for things to go wrong. In these cases, you can typically rely on the customer support of your web hosting service.

Those offering free unlimited web hosting typically have poor customer support. This is because good customer support is typically paid for by the cost of a product. A free product is unable to provide the support you need.

This poor customer support means you may not be able to contact customer service directly. You may have to rely on web forums or have to submit problem tickets online.

All of this means it will take a long time to fix any problems you are having. The longer these problems persist, the more revenue you lose. This is one of many ways in which you end up losing money on “free” hosting.

5. The Limits of “Unlimited”

In addition to being free, many users are attracted to the idea of unlimited hosting. However, there are typically many limitations to “unlimited” hosting.

Your web hosting service may throttle down your usage once you have used what they think is too much of their resources. Other services place a hard limit on the number of visitors that your site can receive.

After restricting your services, these hosts may ask you to pay a premium to continue using them. This means you end up paying for a “free” service filled with restrictions. You would have been better off at this point paying for a high-quality web hosting service like this site instead.

6. Unreliable Servers

When it comes to your website, a reliable service is the most important thing. However, free unlimited web hosting services typically have unreliable servers.

The cost of a good web host helps pay for servers that guarantee an uptime of 99.9%. Free hosting serves often cut corners, resulting in a site with a lower uptime.

Research has shown that losing only .5% of uptime is equivalent to your entire site being down for two days. If your website is a source of revenue, this represents a drastic loss of income.

Conclusion

Finding a good hosting service is only the beginning. Afterwards, you must ensure that your website is getting as many visitors as possible.

One of the best ways to do this is to get a free site report card for your website. Site Report Card offers a number of free services, including SEO audit tools. Making a few simple changes based on these tools can increase the number of visitors to your site and position you as a thought leader in your industry.