Just like you need a building or a physical office space for a business, the business needs a website as well. Owning a website means you will have to figure out the right web host. Web hosting Dubai offers a wide variety of hosting services that will meet any business website requirements. 

There are free hosting services among them. On paper, this would seem to be a great deal. But in reality, website owners simply overlook some key points of the service that could bring up unforeseen issues sooner than later.

So does free web hosting cost you? Let’s get into the details, starting with an overview.

Businesses always have the option of hosting their webpages on their own servers. But this requires a lot of time and investment to maintain the machines in good condition. It’s more expensive than having a web hosting service provider host the site. Every web hosting service vary when it comes to features and cost. The ones that provide free hosting services may not deliver what they are supposed to deliver. 

How?

For starters, think about the purpose of a business. Make profit, of course. And how does a web hosting company that provide free hosting services make money? Many of them offer a free hosting service as part of some other service. It’s more like an encouragement to buy that service and have the website hosted for free as a bonus. 

So you get free hosting only if you subscribe to and pay for that service which provides free web hosting as a bonus. Many other hosting companies provide free hosting as a sample. Web owners can do a trial run, have their website hosted for free for a certain period of time, and then make payments for the full package if they are interested. 

Other issues

Reliability

Out of the thousands of free hosting services in the market, only a select few are reliable. Some of these services are run by hobbyists hoping to make a quick buck through advertising in websites freely hosted in their servers or by unsuccessful entrepreneurs trying to get a solid start for their business. In addition to this, because mostly small organizations offer services for free, continued service is not guaranteed. They may close up shop out of the blue, leaving your website homeless. 

Occasional outages, delays and other issues can be expected. Because paid service providers require a steady income source, they’d be focusing more on keeping customers satisfied with proper management and stability. 

Advertising

One of the best income sources for free hosting service providers is advertising. They would be happy to host websites freely on their servers. There is a catch though. The providers can post advertisements on the freely hosted websites, and get paid for it. The website owner will not generally have control over the ads, and neither will he get paid for the advertisements posted on his website by the provider. 

Limited features

Free hosting services often come with limited resources, which in turn means you can’t expect a lot of features from the service. The website owner might even find it difficult to add more pages or multimedia content to the website as they could be capped. So businesses won’t have much room for digital expansion. This applies to even popular free hosting sites. You may not even have your own domain name, which would indicate a comparatively poorer standard for your business. 

Paid hosting services, on the other hand, provides a plethora of features including multimedia support, design templates, domain names, blogs, plugins, and reliable technical support. 

Conclusion

Free hosting service should not be an option even if your business doesn’t have a lot of investment or operational budget, because in the long run, it will only degrade your business’ productivity, hinder its growth, and might even contribute to losing business. Paid hosting service, despite the investment, is a less risky alternative.