Free Web Hosting Vs Professional – Five Key Differences

When you’re just starting out as a small business or find yourself in any way struggling to make ends meet, the idea of free web hosting is almost too tempting to resist. In fact it’s totally too much to resist for hundreds of thousands of businesses the world over who right now are running sites largely 100% free of charge, thanks to the rather generous offers of their hosting providers.      However, there are certain important differences that must be taken into account before choosing one over the other as to dive blindly into a bargain can end up proving a costly mistake going forward. What follows is a quick overview of five of the most important differences of all between free and professional hosting from a small business perspective:URLFirst up, to choose a free hosting package is to choose a domain name that also features the name of the hosting company along with your own. Not the end of the world you might think, but not only does this look anything but professional, but it also tells every visitor that you’re not paying a penny for your website and doesn’t really give the right impression off. Go pro and you get a fully unique domain name that’s yours and yours alone.ConsistencyWith a free hosting package, it’s really not as if you can complain to the provider if and when you find your site is inaccessible for several hours in the space of a single day. After all, you’re not paying them a penny and they don’t technically owe you anything. By contrast, professional hosting means more often than not the promise of 99.99% uptime, which means that your site will almost never be down and will not lose business.SEODue to there being so many spammers and general scam artists using free hosting these days, it can be very, very difficult to get a site built and run with a free hosting package to appear anywhere in the top-end of the search rankings. Google and Co. just don’t look too kindly upon these kinds of sites and it’s likely that any SEO efforts made will fall pretty flat. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to become largely successful with a free site and a free hosting package, but in terms of success in SEO stakes, it’s a tricky one to pull off.BandwidthWill a free hosting package be enough to support thousands of hits to your site every hour of every day? Probably not, so in the interest of being able to support the levels of traffic you’d ideally like to attract, pro is the best way forward for business.Customer CareAnd finally, when it comes to free hosting packages it is unlikely that you are going to receive 24/7 dedicated support as and when things go wrong…these guys aren’t gonna work for free, after all. So, if you’d prefer to know that any and all problems can and will be ironed out by a knowledgable support team, it pays to go pro.