Why Free Web hosting Service ?

by Jayaram V

Free web hosting has lost its shine and glory with the emergence of very cheap web hosting services. For a few dollars each month you can now have a website up and running in minutes. If you want to take a look at the available offers from some of the reputed web hosting companies in the world you can visit the web hosting page on web hosting we have provided and take a look at what you can get for a monthly payment as low as three to ten dollars. Interestingly many of these web hosting companies offer free domain registration, free set up,  huge bandwidth, hundreds of email accounts and multiple domain hosting and parking options under one account with disk space ranging from 500n MB to 10 GB. Even the cost of renting a dedicated server has come down drastically making it possible to rent a complete server for your websites for a fee that would have been inadequate few years ago to host your multiple sites on a shared hosting service.

Obviously in this environment many of the free web hosting services are vulnerable to slow starvation as they have to rely entirely upon ad revenue to sustain themselves which is not easy at all. Especially in a competitive environment where they have to compete with companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN.com and others for ad space (please see Website Promotion for more info), one can understand how much pressure these companies have to withstand to survive and succeed.

The emergence of blogs have created further competition to the free web hosting services. The blog sites are easy to set up and manage, which makes them a very attractive option for people who little time or knowledge to worry about the basics of creating and marinating individual websites that are hosted on shared servers. 

While these are real and genuine problem as users we can take advantage of the services provided by Free Web hosting Companies in the following circumstances:

1. Students can learn a lot by hosting a free website to understand the basics of how to design, develop and maintain websites on the internet. They can become familiar with website design and development tools, file management and file upload issues, website maintenance and site monitoring. For instance boinc.ch offer free shell accounts on their server, primarily for people interested in the UNIX environment, for students and for developers, and for people who want a personal homepage on the internet. Their goal is "to allow everybody to use a UNIX account on a real server. Or maybe you want to start using UNIX/Linux, but you simply don't have a computer to play with, or maybe you had problems installing the Operating System, and you simply want to familiarize with the common commands and environment to see if it is worth your time to install it locally?"

2. Free websites are also useful in sharing web content among groups having similar interests but not able to spend money for one reason or the other. By posting useful information and providing mutual links these sites may gain search engine visibility as well.

3. Voluntary organizations and non-profit organizations with low capital can use these services to set up a basic website to publish information about news and events or communicate with participants.

4. Good for family websites, sharing photographs and important family events of general importance. While I see a limited use here, I would be concerned about privacy issues and placing family information on a website that is freely accessible to every one especially the scam artists. If at all used, please ensure that the are made accessible to authorized users only, which means you have to put in place a proper authentication (login) model for your website.

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