Should you Choose Paid Hosting?

A website is only as good as the hosting service hosting it. Good website hosting makes your site available for users everywhere and allows them to access your site with a minimum of problems. Bad web hosting, by contrast can cause problems such as excessive downtime, which can be deadly to your site.

When you decide which web hosting company to use, you will discover that there are free hosting sites and paid hosting sites. Free hosting has the big advantage of being free, but there are disadvantages. The main disadvantage is having to run banner ads over which you have no control. Also, your domain name will have the hosting company’s name as a part of it, and your site will have more restrictions than it would with paid hosting.

You almost always get better service with paid hosting. In fact, for business websites, paid hosting is pretty much essential for e-commerce sites. With paid hosting you don’t have to have the hosting company’s ads on your site, and you can choose any adverts you have (if you have advertising on your site at all). You will have more flexibility with paid hosting than you do with free hosting. Whether you have a basic website, or whether you have huge databases and different media like videos, paid hosting will accommodate you much more easily. In fact, some free hosting sites are very restrictive in how large your site can be.

Even if you only need minimal bandwidth and disk space, you’re still often better off with paid hosting. If your site includes large downloads or large databases, paid hosting will give you the most options as far as shared versus dedicated versus virtual dedicated hosting. Paid hosting will also give you more options as to whether you want to take care of the site yourself or if you want someone else to do it.

There are, as you might expect, large differences in price between paid web hosting services. Even within one hosting service there may be a range of prices for different hosting needs. You can pay anywhere from a few dollars a month to hundreds of dollars per month. Fortunately, it is a very competitive industry, and prices are generally coming down.

Free hosting often comes with its own headaches, and you’ll probably have a harder time getting them resolved. Lack of support is one of the main problems with free web hosting. Such problems are much less likely with paid hosting. In general paid hosting services have much better technical and customer support than free services. Most good paid hosting services have around the clock support involving the help of real people rather than just an answering machine. You’ll also receive statistics of your visitors and other site analytics when you have paid hosting. They also usually want very much to have satisfied customers, so they want you to speak up when you have issues.

Choosing from among the thousands of web hosting platforms can be difficult. If your site targets a particular geographic region, you’ll do better if your website is hosted by a company from that area. You should ask yourself and your potential web hosts what you really need for your website to be successful. A good website host will be able to answer your questions and can become a valuable team member when it comes to getting your site the attention that it deserves.