Why Paid hosting is better than Free hosting

Posted by Felix Okoli on Saturday September 13, 2014 at 13:24:27:

There are several reasons why paid hosting is way better than free hosting. Although a lot of entrepreneurs would welcome the thought of having free stuff as opposed to shelling out hard earned cash for a domain name and hosting monthly or yearly but here’s why you should not do this.

Free hosting is more expensive than paid hosting. No, I’m not contradicting myself. It costs more than you don’t pay. Here’s how:

1. A lot of clients feel businesses with free websites are not professional enough. Who would you pick if you wanted to outsource work? The guy who makes it his business to dedicate a website to his business (pun intended) www.xxx.com or the guy that chooses to use www.xxx.blogspot.com? A dot com says “I know my onions”, “I make a living from it”, “I mean business”. A free website says “I’m not really serious about this”, “I’m just doing this on the chance it makes money”. It’s a no-no people! Linda Ikeji might get away with it but you won’t, not if you are building a real business from scratch. Besides, she gets away with it because she has a large following, built with a lot of hard work and because her business is blogging!

2. Free Isn’t Really Free. “Free” Websites actually take a lot from you. Take Google AdSense for example. Most websites monetize their pages so they actually make money both offline (if they are a business) and online. However, “free” websites keep a big percentage of those earnings, yes, between 40 – 60% allegedly. Ads are mostly splattered across the pages and this can sometimes distract your clients. Yeah! You don’t want a female client chasing the lovely shoe ad forgetting why she was there in the first place. The worst part is you have no control about the ads shown (Google AdSense or not) and sometimes this can be inappropriate for your target audience or just bordering on annoying. If you’re a blogger, you can decide to use a free website but you can be sure your earnings will not be everything you truly earn as taking part of what you earn from Ads is exactly why they are “free website” businesses.

3. Most free stuff does not last forever. You might think they are the next best thing but Yahoo decided to close their some of their services July 13, 2009 and when this happened, GeoCities (free web hosting service) was closed down. What will you do if your free service provider says it’s time to pack it up and stop being so generous?

4. Free websites are very limited as to layouts; themes etc. They also do not allow paid template or theme integration. See why clients feel free websites do not depict professionalism? This just reeks of cheap and cheap is bad people!
For those who do not know, these days paid hosting is really affordable and you only get to pay once a year although this is dependent on the plan you pick. There are also some really nice themes and templates you could use. Some are free and some would require paper (you know what I mean).If you are not a “techie”, well, don’t worry. Wordpress is taking the lead these days in the easy content management field; it’s pretty basic but powerful stuff.Above all always remember, business (products, services, blogging etc.) is serious stuff, so treat it as such and you will surely reap the benefits.