Domain Name - Friday, January 2, 2009 3:12 - 0 Comments

Look Before you Leap into Free Web Hosting

Free web hosting is a reality that many have taken advantage of over the past several years. There are many professional looking websites that offer some flexibility in the appearance of your website, and learning to work within these hosting sites is easy.

Social networking is a popular type of website these days, and there are many free web space possibilities like Facebook and Myspace. These sites are intended to connect with your friends, and build new friendships. You have some flexibility as to who can view your website as well.

For the photo buff you will want to consider a photo friendly site. While all the free web space hosts give you the ability to load your photos, web hosts such as flicker specialize in this area.

Most of the free web space hosts have additional features to enhance and customize your website, such as templates for the appearance. Add on features include features like linking, photo upload, and comment sections where others can remark on your postings.

There is yet another level to free web hosting that many of these free sites do not allow, and that is the display of ads. Sure, you can talk about something you offer, and provide links to other sites, but many have it in their sign up that commercial sites are not allowed. Some do allow Google Adsense, such as the Blogspot site now owned by Google.

One of the disadvantages of a free web space is the name of your website. Though you will have a little creative latitude on a portion of the name, it will always contain your free web space domain name as well. One example of this is http://atravel-adventure.blogspot.com. The host domain is blogspot, with the subdomain atravel-adventure.

Depending on the type of site you want to have, you may have to think about paid hosting. For example, if you want your own domain name, like http://afreewebspace.com, , you will need to find a hosting site and purchase your domain name. Having your own host gives you more control as to the design and features of your site. One options is using a content management system, which we will talk about in the next article in this series.

One thing for sure, if you find that your free web space is not going to give you all the features you would like, you can always change to another site. Youre not out any money, just your time. You can keep your free site up and running and link to your new site.

The best thing about free web hosting is that your photos and ideas are safe in the event you have a computer crash or other data catastrophe. While not meant to be a data storage space, you can always retrieve your photos from your online space.

Free web space hosting is here to stay. Isnt it time you start your own website?