You need a hosting to build a website over it. Your website's visiting experience highly depends on your hosting.
In the initial days, everyone wants to invest less (even I did the same) to reduce the investment costs but it is always wise to invest at right place to get better returns.
But if you are starting a blog as a business entity, you can't rely on free hosting.
I am sharing a comparison of free vs paid hosting on some common factors that will give you a clear idea about both types.
Free vs Paid Hosting
Free hosting
Branding. Good hosting has a very important role in the website visiting experience. Free hosting provides your blog name as a subdomain name.
For example, If I would have my blog CashOverflow on blogspot or wordpress, it would have looked like this- Cashoverflow.blogspot.com or Cashoverflow.wordpress.com
It doesn't look like a brand.
For a hobby blogger thats okay to have a free hosting because his intent is not to earn money.
Speed. Speed of free hosting servers is low as compared to paid hosting.
Tech support. Customer support in free hosting is just a FAQ page (Frequently Asked Questions) but they don't provide personalized tech support. (Why they spend on tech support staff, if they are not charging you anything)
Disk space. You get limited disk space to use. Wordpress provides 3 gb space.
Let's have a look at why Paid hosting is preferred by professionals over Free hosting.
Why Paid Hosting?
Branding
If you are starting an online business, you won't compromise with the branding at all. If your blog will not look brandable, no one will bother to visit it. You need a unique name to show your online presence. For example, which would you prefer to visit CashOverflow.com or CashOverflow.blogspot.com?
Personalized name of your blog look more credible. This increases visitors trust in your blog.
Speed
Another major difference between free and paid hosting is speed. In paid hosting, you get lightning fast servers, your website runs smooth.
Remember.. Internet, people have a very short attention span. According to a study by Microsoft, the average human being now has an attention span of eight seconds. Earlier, the average attention span was 12 seconds in the year 2000.
If your webpage crawls to load, they will run away without wasting time.
User Experience
Free hosting pages ruin user experience with ads. See, it takes hours of effort to complete one beautiful article but what to do if your reader can't focus on your content because of annoying ads.
Paid hosting doesn't have ads. It gives you clean setup without ads.
Security
You get high security from cyber attacks in paid hosting. You can't risk your content assets and your customers personal data (depending upon your niche especially ecommerce) to get stolen.
Tech support
You come to know that your blog is down and you have no one to contact. That's free hosting.
Feeling helpless?
Solution is Paid Hosting.
In paid hosting, uptime of site is quite high & in case any issue arises, there tech team will be there to resolve the issue.
Disk space
You get huge space to upload your images, podcasts, videos in paid hosting as compared to free hosting where you have a limited amount of space to upload your data.
Can you take the risk of sitting clueless and letting your readers suffer from slow speed, more downtime, annoying ads ?
No.
So ,
you have decided to go for paid hosting but one more hurdle that you have crossover is which paid hosting you should opt. Market is flooded with different cheap hosting providers. Do all of them are reliable?
I have burnt my hands in cheap hosting as well. In my starting days of blogging, when I decided to move from blogspot to my own domain, I got trapped in the lurking cheap plans of Godaddy.
I was not aware about that I thought hosting down is a common problem but with experience I learnt that I was just wasting my reader's precious time and not only that I was losing my potential customers.
Then I researched thoroughly and moved to Siteground.
And till now, 90% of my websites are running on siteground servers.
That's all about web hosting.
In the next email, you will learn about how to improve the functionality of your wordpress blog using different themes and plugins.
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