So many things have been written about the disadvantages of having free web hosting for blogs over the years. I don’t actually want to add up to the already cluttered information about this topic but just could not control myself into giving a piece of my mind about this issue.
Why, because I have experienced having both paid and free websites. Right now, I have a free WordPress.com blog which I started a few years back and a paid one which is hosted by ipage. So I can pretty much discuss the advantages of both platforms based on my experience.
What I noticed is that most blogs and articles written about the topic favor mostly having a paid website as against free web hosting. While there are indeed advantages when you start off with a paid web hosting platform, there are also a lot of advantages when you decide to publish a website using free web hosting services and the most striking are the following.
Your blog can stay forever in the web for free
Okay, may be not really forever. But as long as the free web hosting service that you used as platform is present in the worldwide web, your blog will stay there also and can be seen by people even long after you stopped blogging. You don’t have to pay yearly dues so there is no worry that your blog website can be taken down for non-payment of dues. A paid website does not share this advantage because if you fail to pay the yearly dues as well as the domain fees, you will lose your website and no one can access it anymore.
There are actually thousands if not already millions of websites that can no longer be accesses because the owner decided to stop paying the yearly dues of paid web hosting providers. Knowing that this can happen to your paid website in the future, why would you decide to waste money on paid hosting services? As long as you follow the terms and conditions of a platform, you need not worry about your blog.
You can also earn money from a free web hosting service
There are now free web hosting services that allow you to monetize your site. If before, this opportunity is limited only to paid web hosting services, now you can create a blog using free web hosting and make money at the same time. This is one of the main reasons why many old time bloggers shifted to free blogging sites like blogger for instance. They don’t have to worry about the yearly dues and they can make money at the same time. This is the ideal set-up for people who just want to enjoy what they are doing and not be trapped by the rat race going on between competing blogs in the worldwide web.
You can learn the basics and not worry about anything
If you are a novice blogger, free web hosting is definitely advantageous for you. There are no difficult coding required and you don’t have to know CSS. You can pretty much set-up a blog without the help of anybody. Even a kid can set-up a website using free web hosting. With a paid website, there is a tendency to make it look appealing to visitors so you have to learn the technical side or to hire an expert to create web pages. Everything is spoon fed when you use a free web hosting provider.
