We have some Pro’s & Con’s to share….
Recently – we were asked the question. “Why wouldn’t a business use a FREE solution?”
There are many FREE services out there online when you search for them – so we took some time this week to create our own basic websites on FREE hosting servers so we could answer the above question using personal experience and not just theory or word of mouth.
Even though we chose web hosting to base our conclusion on for the purposes of this blog – the same principle can be used for any type of free service, whether that is backup or applications.
Below are the Pro’s and Cons that we faced with a majority all of the free solutions we tested:
Pro’s of FREE Hosting:
1: FREE Solution:
The provider offers a (So called) free solution to businesses that haven’t got a lot of capital to spend.
2: Gets you online (for free)
For no money you can get your idea/business online.
3: Ideal for Beginners:
Good starting point to get familiar with websites and to test your abilities.
4: Domain Name / Website Url:
In most cases this is more of a Con than a Pro. The Pro is you will not need to buy a domain name so again it is Free.
Con’s of FREE Hosting:
1: Forced Advertising:
FREE Hosting providers force advertising on sites created with them. They also reserve the right to place banner advertisements across the website stating that the website has been created for FREE or even worse – they could advertise one of your competitor’s services.
This shows potential customers strait away that the business isn’t taking things seriously. Those that don’t invest slightly in the initial stage and get things right, will lose business to those that do.
2: No Access to Your Data:
In cases of disaster recovery – this plays a large factor when planning a website for business use. FREE Hosting services allow you access to the front end of the site to make changes, just like a basic word press login as you may be familiar with. How-ever – many of our clients who have been down this road have experienced partial or in worst cases complete data loss that could go back many years depending on how much work was put into the site.
When you are on our hosting platform for example – we take care of backups personally on a weekly basis and are here to assist in restoring the data as and when requested as standard with no additional cost included.
Again – because your website data is unreachable – transferring to a more stable hosting platform at a later date seems virtually impossible from what we seen during our testing.
3: Limited Resources:
FREE Hosting solutions don’t include the resources and scalability included in professional cPanel hosting. Creating email accounts seemed tedious, longwinded and on some sites it was chargeable for each account you create. Storage and bandwidth limits are also restricted. Finally – the software and additional scripting included in paid cPanel are far superior and focuses more on business growth.
4: Site URL/Domain Name:
If you decide to choose free web hosting – apart from the above issue’s the URL/Domain to access your website in many cases looks like this: www.username.provider.com/sitename which as a rule of thumb is not acceptable in business and further reduces the potential in customers trusting your service/product and making a purchase or enquiry.
We noticed options to add your own domain name, but this is chargeable at the rate of £4 – £10 per month and depending on what option you choose – there is still an element of ad supporting being forced onto your site.
5: Restricted Growth:
Taking all the above issue’s into consideration – there is an impact on the potential growth of your website.
Here is a scenario to explain:
- You start your FREE Hosting and have all the above problems to accept.
- You stay with your free web hosting for a period of time and have added a lot of content to your site.
- You decide that now you would like to do things properly and want to move to a more stable paid solution. It’s at this point you realise that you don’t have access to your data and you can’t simply take the website and transfer/migrate it across.
You then have two choices:
1: Pay the free hosting company to send you YOUR data. Then you will need to either hire some support or personally learn how to put this data on a new web hosting platform.
2: Pay a web development/design team for a full website build and an expensive data/content migration to the new hosting as all data must be copied and pasted across separately piece by piece, page by page and can’t just be backed up and imported.
Conclusion:
To avoid all issue’s mentioned in this post and to put your business in the best possible position – our professional suggestion is to keep the running cost’s to a minimum in the early stages by choosing a trusted provider and selecting their most cost effective hosting package that suites your basic requirements.
This hosting package must include what’s known as cPanel. cPanel is the easiest to use control panel that provides access to all background area’s of your website including data backup area – so you can download and have your files saved offline in a secure location incase you ever need to restore a broken/corrupted file that’s stopping the website from working or you have problems with your provider and want to change.
Now that you are aware of the issue’s you could possibly face and that costs can spiral out of control if wrong decisions are made – the question is “Would your business use a FREE solution?”