Conventional wisdom would answer with: nothing is free. Everything comes with a price. Web hosting, in particular, is not something that any company can provide without cost. The only real question left to answer is how those companies pay for those costs, usually by passing them onto the customer.<\/p>\n

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Companies like WordPress, for example, offer free blog hosting and even give their blogging software away for free. While the software is truly free, the hosting services may still generate money for the provider. WordPress uses ad revenue and other paid features to recoup their costs and make a profit. Companies like Google offer a wide variety of cloud hosting services, but their revenue comes primarily from advertisements. In this sense, these “freemium” services are a lot like broadcast TV networks. Advertisements pay the bills.<\/p>\n

For full-featured web hosting with your own domain name, free web hosting is probably non-existent. Even if you were to run your own server from your basement, you would still have power and network costs.<\/p>\n

The other question you might want to ask yourself is how reliable a free hosting service actually is, especially if the company claiming to offer it has not found a way to make a reasonable amount of money to sustain itself. The last thing you want is to setup your web presence on a fly-by-night service that could be gone tomorrow. For stability and security, even a budget hosting service is better than free.<\/p>\n

Having said all of that, free hosting may serve a good purpose, such in the case of the blogging sites mentioned above or for temporary sites and test pages. If you can use the services without the fear of losing important data or having unreliable connectivity, free hosting may be ideal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conventional wisdom would answer with: nothing is free. Everything comes with a price. Web hosting, in particular, is not something that any company can provide without cost. The only real question left to answer is how those companies pay for those costs, usually by passing them onto the customer. Companies like WordPress, for example, offer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":388,"featured_media":2058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[164],"tags":[316,319,165,98,315,318,317,281,320,275],"yoast_head":"\n