This is one of the questions almost every “newbie” asks when they decide to set up their own website. Sure, there are tons of free webhosts out there, but let me explain you why you should not hop inside the “free web hosting” bus.
Let’s start with one phrase, nothing is free. As you may, or may not know, websites are hosted on servers (which are essentially computers) so when you set up a website somewhere, it means that person or company is letting you use their hard drive space, processing power, internet connection, and everything that comes with it. Now, who would give all of this away to thousands of people for free? Well, they would have to get some sort of profit, and where do they get this profit? They get it from your website.
If you set up your website at a free webhost, you will almost certainly be forced to place ads on it; also, you have much more less control of your design, because almost all force you to use their own “website builder”. This means you cannot have Wordpress, Joomla, PHPbb, or whatever you want to use. Now, the second big problem is having your own domain name. When you decided to have a website, you surely thought about having your own domain, like www.yourname.com, but virtually all free webhosts force you to have something like www.somefreewebhost.com/yourname, and that isn’t good for either SEO or your web presence.
Now, if you did a little research, you might be thinking something like “Hey, but this free webhost I’m looking at allows me to have my own domain and remove the ads if I pay a little fee!” Sure, some allow you to do that. Some, like 000webhost, don’t place ads on your site, allow you to have your own domain, have PHP and MySQL, and have respectable bandwidth and storage space. But what is wrong with them? Many users complain of speed and reliability. Like stated at the beginning, nothing is free, so something that seems to must have some downsides. For example, you still have issues like not being able to use your own publishing engine (like the ones mentioned above) and no free webhost outperforms a paid web host in terms of up time (which affects the reliability of your website), bandwidth (which determines the amount of people that can visit your website within an established period of time), storage space for your files, features and overall control of the files and programs you install. Some free webhosts don’t even allow you to install third party programs.
There are a lot of low priced, reliable webhosts out there; you just have to do a little research. But hey, go for a free webhost if you don’t need anything big or fancy: some can be pretty nice. Just remember that nothing is free, and if you want to do something with good quality and all that comes along with it, paying is worth it.