Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Considerations when Choosing Free Web Hosting

By Theodore Metagastar

Free web hosting is a reality that many have taken advantage of over the past several years. There are many professional looking websites that offer some flexibility in the appearance of your website, and learning to work within these hosting sites is easy.

Social networking is a popular type of website these days, and there are many free web space possibilities like Facebook and Myspace. These sites are intended to connect with your friends, and build new friendships. You have some flexibility as to who can view your website as well.

For the photo buff you will want to consider a photo friendly site. While all the free web space hosts give you the ability to load your photos, web hosts such as flicker specialize in this area.

Most of the free web space hosts have additional features to enhance and customize your website, such as templates for the appearance. Add on features include features like linking, photo upload, and comment sections where others can remark on your postings.

Do you plan to use your site to generate revenue by displaying ads? You will want to look at Blogspot for your free hosting. Adsense, one of the biggest ad based revenue resources, is owned by Google. Blogspot is owned by Google. Put two and two together, and these two aspects of the Google empire can be just what you are looking for.

One of the disadvantages of a free web space is the name of your website. Though you will have a little creative latitude on a portion of the name, it will always contain your free web space domain name as well. One example of this is http://atravel-adventure.blogspot.com. The host domain is blogspot, with the subdomain atravel-adventure.

If you are set on having your own domain name, like http://afreewebspace.com, you will have more latitude as far as the type of site you will have, such as an html site or a content management system, or CMS site, which we will discuss in the next article in this series. You will have costs involved for a hosting service.

Check out some of the free web space hosting sites to compare services available. Even if you outgrow your free web space hosting over time you can always link it to a new site, such as your own domain, and flow the traffic you have built to the new location.

One good thing about having a free web space is that you have storage off site for your photos and ideas. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard someone praise their online free web site for keeping their precious photos when they suffer a computer crash or otherwise lose data.

There is no doubt about it, free web space hosting is the way to go for that starter website. Either way, your voice will be heard through your words and picture, or literally though MP3 files on your site.

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