Personal Web Hosting – Free Or Cheap?
After you have spent some time and creativity on designing
your personal web site now it’s time to publish it on the World
Wide Web for all to see it.
When coming to web hosting, many face the dilemma of choosing
between free or paid web hosting.
Although the costs associated with paid web hosting is rather
small, it’s still money.
An easy and money free solution might seem to be registering it
with a free web-hosting provider. They come in large numbers
today and the 10-20 Megs of free personal space they usually
offer sounds tempting. Not to mention that some of them even
offer POP3 for your e-mail address on their web site or FTP
access to your files on the web site. So it looks like all this
is building up to become quite an alternative to spending dear
money for almost the same thing. I mean paid web hosting for an
individual’s web site sound a little pretentious, doesn’t it?
Sure paid web hosting gives some more space, quite a few more
features and all that, but do you need them anyway? You probably
just need a web server that can feed .HTML and maybe some simple
java scripts to your visitor. It’s not like you are ever going
to need an SQL database, support for .ASP or .PHP. You just want
your own web site, not an e-commerce solution or you are ever
going to need more than one e-mail address for your own use.
A more careful look at the matter is likely to make the right
decision easier to take. As a matter of fact, depending on the
objectives trusted to your personal web site, the decision
between free or cheap almost dictates itself. You should also
keep in mind that you actually trusting your virtual image to
the web host.
In exchange for the hosting you won’t be asked for money, but
there could be banners, hot links, frames, popup windows or
other forms of online advertising that will interfere with the
content of your web site, possibly having a bad effect on its
look and almost certainly annoying your visitors.
Another minus is that your traffic is not likely to attain very
high values due to the long domain name. People are not going to
return to your web site simply because they forgot its URL.
Therefore if people haven’t added your site to their bookmarks,
and if your web site is not easily reachable through search
engine search or fro other linked sites, it is very likely that
your traffic scores would not be very impressive.
A personal web site could be very useful asset in promoting your
professional image to potential or actual employers and business
contacts. Regardless we are considering the URL or e-mail
address, what would an employer for example think when handed a
business card with an e-mail address like
yourname@freeserver.com. Would you feel comfortable going to a
job interview and leaving your resume referring to your online
portfolio available at www.yourname.yetanotherfreehost.com? All
your effort and skill displayed by your web content would be
almost surely hurt by as little as your URL. Not fair, but
likely.
A part of the image of successful professionals nowadays is a
good personal website. It is well known that success generates
success.
The look of a personal URL and e-mail such us www.yourname.biz
or contact@yourname.com would definitely benefit to your image
as a professional. As you were diligent enough to have a
personal website, the matter of trusting it to a free web host
or investing an additional and usual small amount of money might
be the difference of being associated with a success story of
your career or with the cliché of a quite all right fellow that
is barely struggling and would make compromises even when it
comes to its image.
Any problems with the web host, possible downtime, and narrow
bandwidth will chase your visitors away and will be associated
to your web site.
On the other hand, if your are just stating your experience with
the World Wide Web, or if your are setting up a web site with
only close friends and relatives as intended audience, a free
web host might just do it for you. These are just a few of the
examples of having a good reason to publish your web site on a
free hosting provider.
Free web hosts helped thousands of people to familiarize
themselves with the Internet experience, as first cradles for
their web presence. This is one of the reasons free web hosts
have contributed to the overall popularity of the Internet. As
comfortable as cradles are, you can’t spend your whole life in
the cradle!
So, if you are planning to have a web site to represent you
online and you want to be taken seriously, to actually enhance
your personal image, make right. Make your web site a living
proof of your thoroughness and start with your URL.
