I tried making money out of free hosts and i did average around $100 per month !! But sure it wasn't enough for me but still it was worth it !

What company have you been with?

Free hosting tends to go down more, they will be to first to terminate you. (As it doesn't matter to them, they are not making any money on you)
One plus is, sometimes if the free host company owns a paid hosting, is you can get a discount to move up to paid hosting.

not many free hosts would do this, why would they give you a discount for moving into a paid account when you have been using their resources for free beforehand.

I understand when a free hosting provider gives a free package to test drive their services before upgrading to a paid plan that is highly limited in all aspects: space, little bandwidth, 1 database. However, if the free package includes lots of GBs of space/bandwidth there is no motivation to switch to a paid plan. A discount is irrelevant since most offer free packages with resources more than sufficient for any small/medium website.

No free hosts can't be trusted. Because you have no control over your site being up, or your data integrity really, just pay the monthly fee for a trustworthy host, is more than worth it.

If I was to use a free hosting provider, it would have to be a well established company with a track record. Saying that, I've never used a free host in my life if I remember correctly. Paid hosting is cheap enough and if you can't afford the measly few dollars it costs per month to have a well provided hosting package, why even bother setting up a website?

Websites always cost money, PERIOD.

For webhosting companies who want to grow free hosting is a good way of getting a few paid clients. We offer a free trial for 15 days with hopes that they will buy at the end of the offer. Enjoy

Offering Free Hosting and offering a Free Trial are 2 totally different things.

a free trial is giving the end user a set period without charge of the acutal plan as you say in the hope they continue.

free hosting is to give a plan to an end user without any payment for this plan for as long as they require the plan

Yes they are different but they all still follow the same principle.

free hosting is where a host will give plans away FREE, these plans will be full of ads and will not have features like MySQL, CGI, emails etc.

a free trial is where you order paid hosting as normal, but the host will allow you to use the plan for a short period before you are invoiced.

these are 2 different things with different principles.


MOD NOTE: Post edited. It is healthy to have a difference of opinions in a debate. But it is unhealthy to have it lead to unfriendly behaviour. Let's respect the essential rule (3.1) of this community by staying respectful to other users and avoiding personal comments.

The term "free" means the same, regardless of how it's used or presented.


MOD NOTE: Post edited. It is healthy to have a difference of opinions in a debate. But it is unhealthy to have it lead to unfriendly behaviour. Let's respect the essential rule (3.1) of this community by staying respectful to other users and avoiding personal comments.

don't they tend to oversell? i wouldn't go for free hosts.

Free hosting: pro and contra
A lot of hosting companies now provide free hosting. Is free hosting good or not? Should you use it? What is better: free or paid hosting?

Our answer is: paid hosting. Below we'll list the disadvantages of free hosting for you to know more about it and do immediately sign up for it. Actually, "free" doesn't mean "the best".

No ownership

The main disadvantage of using free web hosting service is that you don’t control your own site. There may be frequent changes to free hosting provider services and policies and then you might be forced to look for a new webhosting, transferring the content may not be allowed as well. Thus, do not take a risk with free web hosting services, you'd better go for paid web hosting services.

No Guarantee

When using free hosting service, your website may face downtime and there is no guarantee that your hosting provider will try to get your website “up” soon because the service is free and you do not pay for maintenance. Thus you are not guaranteed that your site will be up all the time and you are left on your own without even being able to complain for their slow customer service.

Lack of benefits

There are numerous benefits available with paid web hosting services, unlike free web hosting. For example, you may need to have sub-domains for your websites. But free web hosting services won't provide you with such service. Moreover, there are lots of limitations at free hosting providers, such as limited diskspace, limited bandwidth and so on.

Advertisement on your site

Many free webhostings provide their services with a condition of reciprocal link (i.e. the link from your site to their site) or adding advertisements to your site. Would you like to have your site overwhelmed with lots of ads? We doubt it. To get reliable hosting with no ads adding, please go here.

Dangerous neighbors

Most adult sites and spam blogs are using free hosting service. This may have impact on your site, with you having nothing to do with it. Though free hosting shouldn't affect search engine ranking, but it would be much better to have better sites hosted on your server.

Free hosting is OKAY is your site is a hobby for you, but for REAL business hosting, I would definitely go paid