All Those Disappearing
Free Web Hosts
By Christopher S L Heng |
Every now and then, more
frequently than you might imagine, I have to prune entries from
my Free Web Hosting listing pages. These web hosts were providing
free web hosting services at the time I included the links.
However, after some time they either disappear completely or
I find that they are suddenly selling commercial web hosting
only.
If you don't want your website to suddenly disappear into thin
air with these free web hosts, here are some tips:
1. Try to go for the web hosts that have been around longer.
If they've been around longer, the chances are hopefully greater
that they'll be around for the life of your site. Hosts like
these include Geocities, Tripod and Hypermart. Note that this
is not an endorsement of these hosts nor is it any guarantee
that they will last.
2. Contrary to what you might think, you might want to consider
hosting only on sites that actually put advertising on your
site. Why? Think about it. To host your site, they have to pay
for your site's connection to the Internet backbone, the initial
capital outlay on the web server hardware and software as well
as the costs of maintaining the server, the IP addresses of
the sites, etc. If they're not earning from advertising, how
are they financing all these? Are you sure people are willing
to keep paying thousands of dollars to host you for free?
Of course it is possible that they're making income in some
other way. For example, some hosts put you on their mailing
list as a requirement for hosting with them. They may thus make
advertising income in that way. It is also possible that they
have other sources of income and the free web hosting is merely
to draw potential customers (like you) to those other services.
That's fine - as long as they have some means of making a profit
from this service, directly or indirectly.
If there's absolutely no way that they're recovering income
from your site, there's a chance that they're providing the
free service as a gimmick prior to launching their commercial
hosting services. The hope is presumably that when they "go
commercial", the people who already host there would just pay
the hosting fees for the convenience of continuing to host there.
Of course there may really be people who truly have a lot of
money to burn and have a good heart, and are thus willing to
incur costs to finance your web site without any hope of a financial
return. Somehow I'm not too hopeful about that.
3. You might also want to go for the hosts that house more sites,
for the simple reason that they're more likely to be able to
make a profit from the advertising they put on your site, and
thus survive longer.
Remember: always be prepared to relocate your site. Keep a copy
of your website on your own computer, so that if the host disappears,
you can easily move somewhere else without having to rewrite
your pages from scratch.
Source:
Copyright by Christopher S L Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion,
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