Is paid web hosting always better than free web hosting?

[st_hart]

What about very cheap web hosting? Is is still better than free web hosting as well? I ask this because upon coming across a free web hosting that promise me they are "better than paid hosting". What do you experience?

[loyalknight10]

I would not recommend going for free hosting instead having a cheap hosting account would be a nice thing to do.

Most of those free hosting sites have bandwidth problem, too much ads, malicious programs and they would delete your account if your site doesn't gets traffic for a minimum 5 days.

[st_hart]

Well, that's I never know before. Thanks for informing. The site that I talked about offer 100 GB monthly bandwidth, which is really appealing. Some friends of mine who are using it also feel contented with it. But I don't know about the malicious program and that our account will get deleted if it doesn't get traffic within 5 days.

[ryan]

I've used various free website hosts in the past and to be honest, I would rather just have paid hosting.

One service in particular was horrible to me and that was Freespace.net. My whole site got deleted and everyone else's that was on Box 13 because of some goof-up on their part. I then re-created my site with them. They promised 90% uptime but the site went down for well over a month and never ended up getting my problems resolved. The only reason I was trying to stay with them is because they allowed the MySQL databases (needed to install wordpress) which most free hosting doesn't offer and they do not show any ads.

The best free hosting that I have used has been 110mb.com. They also do not show any ads on your site and provide site builder tools and etc. The log-in was pretty goofy but manageable. The only downside was they did not offer MySQL databases free. You could buy them for $5 each to add to your account but this was not a good deal to me. I recommend them out of all that I have used but paid hosting is always better in my opinion.

For paid hosting, I absolutely love HostGator. They are among the cheapest on the net but one of the best! I chose the middle of the road (baby croc) hosting for 9.95 per month. They use cPanel with Fantastico so wordpress can be installed in about 2 minutes. I have not had a single complaint while being with this company and wish that I had quit wasting my time a long time ago. For 4 months I dealt with the horrors of free hosting while I finally came to my senses.

If you would like to use HostGator, when you sign up enter the coupon code "wordpress" without the quotes and you will get your first month for $0.01, after that it's just 9.95 (or which ever one you choose)

[drexel]

you can get really awesome cheap hosting. i always use bluehost. they're cheap, they have fantastico so you can install wordpress in seconds. they have amazing support 24 hours a day and i think if you get your domain with them you get your domain free for life. at least that's what the deal used to be. but yeah my site is never down, and in all the years i've been with them i've had zero problems. they also send nice alerts to let you know when you're domain is expiring, even when your domain is with another company.

[drexel]

mmmm abc gum.

[betsyparsons]

The old addage stands... you get what you pay for.

See my new thread here. Its about all those points to consider with choosing a host.

Cheers,

[coop]

Hey guys. Was reading thru and I figured I'd step in here. Personally I run on a dedicated server. If your pushing any kind of volume to your website - or honestly if your doing any kind of transactions to your site I would suggest a dedicated server.

You can get a solid dedicated server for under $200 a month which is nothing compared to what could happen if your site went down on shared hosting for a few hours. Grant it dedicated servers can go down too.

That's one of the reasons I personally suggest two dedicated servers with a load balancer. I know that might be a lot for some people, it really depends on if your website is your living or not like all of mine are.

[sequencehosting]

If am a firm believer that as soon as you pay for web hosting you will never go back to a free host. Coop is right, a dedicated server is the way forward but to start out shared hosting isn't a problem. Most hosts should meet your requirements. Just keep in mind that unlimited bandwidth is impossible, any web-host offering this is overselling and will have terms in their terms of service or acceptable usage policy deeming it impossible to even reach 100GB bandwidth. Also when looking for a web-host be careful with reading those "top 10 hosting" review sites because only the hosts with the highest paying affiliate programs will show

[scottelkin]

It really depends how serious you are about your business. If you care about the speed of your site and the success of your business or website, you wouldn't dare do free hosting.

Fwowf is an example of free hosting. It is a funny word my kid said along with my sister-in-law's explanation of what she thought it meant.

Other than that, pay for hosting.