When To Pay For Your Own Web Hosting

It's really easy to find free web hosting, which is a good thing for many people - but it can mean that some hang onto it for too long, when they would have done better to go for paid hosting earlier. Figuring out how long to keep using a free host and when to switch to a premium plan can be tricky, so we've put together a guide that should help you get to grips with when best to do it.

The Benefits And Drawbacks Of Free Web Hosting

In some cases, free web hosting is really all that's needed - and there's no harm in sticking with it if that's true for you and for your website. There are a lot of benefits to it, after all: it's entirely free and won't set you back any money, you won't need to share your bank details with a provider you might not know a lot about, and it's very simple and straightforward to set up a new website with most free hosts. You'll find that you have the use of a wide variety of free templates, usually, and there's a lot that's easy about the general process.

If you're just setting up, you're likely to find that free hosting is all you require to get things going properly. Most free packages will leave you with enough disk space and bandwidth to run a small website, and generally speaking new and unknown sites don't suffer much from not having a truly custom domain name rather than being hosted on a subdomain.

That said, there are plenty of drawbacks - and as your site grows you'll start to feel them more and more. You won't have enough power or speed to handle lots of hits and heavy loads, and you won't have any control over the kinds of advertisements that your hosts display to people who visit your page. You'll also be using a URL that's part of the host's subdomain rather than your own, and you won't have email addresses to match it - both of which can seem a little unprofessional. As well as all that you'll find that free hosting is very rarely appropriate for ecommerce sites, as you simply can't guarantee the kind of security you need to offer if you are to be trusted with your customer's card details and addresses. These are all important things to consider while you're making this choice.

Knowing When To Move To A Paid Web Hosting Plan

There are a lot of perks that come along with paid hosting, and there will come a time in the life of your website when you'll need to make use of them - and that time might be sooner than you think, so it's worth giving it careful consideration. Some of the most compelling of those perks include:

  • Paid hosts generally offer you the opportunity to buy your own domain, entirely customised to your website's name, and use it for better and more professional-looking email addresses as well as for a URL that your customers and visitors will be able to remember easily.
  • You'll have some choice over the kind of server your site is hosted on, and you'll be able to make your own decisions about which sort of operating system you'd prefer to have used.
  • Obviously, the biggest perk is that you'll have so much extra disk space and bandwidth - meaning that you can host more content on your website, and that it will be able to handle more people accessing that content at the same time as each other.

Making The Final Decision

Obviously, this is something that needs to be entirely your own decision - but it's worth bearing in mind that refusing to go to a paid hosting plan when it's time for you to do so is very likely to lose you more money than you'll save by staying with a free host. It's the only way to make the transition to a proper, professional website that users will trust, and it's a bad idea to put it off for too long.