Free hosting

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Free web hosting services represent web hosting services provided free of money charge. Although the price in terms of money itself is zero, companies have to resort to some other means of gaining funding.

In general, free web hosting services are ad-supported, meaning that banner ads are placed at various locations on your websites. These range, from simple, text-only ads displayed at the bottom of your page, to animated GIFs at the top of the page or in pop up windows.

It is not uncommon for web hosting companies to provide a limited free hosting package, while maintaining paid services and giving users the option to upgrade to a paid account.

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Limitations of free web hosting

Web hosting companies usually impose some limits to motivate the user to upgrade to a paid account. There are several limitations, among which the most common ones are:

  • File-size limit
  • Small monthly bandwidth
  • No hotlinking allowed, and certain file types can be disallowed completely. This is usually done because the company draws a significant amount of profit from ads. Therefore, when there are no HTML files, there are no ads, so they discourage using the web space as storage space.
  • Placing banner ads to all web pages, sometimes with a disruptive effect on the page's outline.
  • Not providing uptime guarantee or full-time technical support
  • Not allowing users to have domain, but rather a sub-domain, like www.hosterurl.com/userdomain or userdomain.hosterurl.com.

The usual target audience of free hosting services is home users, people who don't actually run business through their web presence but rather share some information or conform to a trend. This is why some user-friendly enhancements like web-based control panels and website building tools are provided.

A new trend in free web hosting services is forum-based hosting. Forum-based hosting requires users to register to a forum and meet a certain set of activity requirements (posting a certain number of messages in a week or opening a number of topics) in order to obtain an account. Other services are activation-based, meaning that the user places a description of how he intends to use the website, and a commission reviews it, approving or disapproving the creation of an account.

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