Small business owners who use free web hosting for their business web sites may be cutting their own throats.
Small business owners who want a web site but don't want to pay for a domain name or for hosting many times will go to a free web hosting service for their web site. They may be doing themselves a disservice in the long run.
These free web hosts may be good for personal sites and photos of your children with their dog, but don't use them for business. There are several reasons why.
First, most free web hosting companies make their revenues with banner ads. They place these on your web site. Do you really want your customers going to your web site and seeing an ad to another business that you didn't approve of? Thought not.
Another reason free web hosting doesn't cut it is the service. Many times the service is poor, if there is any service at all. If you have customer or technical support issues, you'll want them to be handled promptly or you run the risk of losing customers. Bill and Ted, who work full time as stock boys at the local supermarket, aren't going to cut it.
Thirdly, most free web hosting services offer limited packages. They may support just one e-mail address or offer a low bandwidth transfer and may not support certain scripts such as Flash or CSS. You'll want a host that is flexible and able to support the latest web design tools.
Free web hosting isn't free. You'll pay for it somewhere along the line. Either it will destroy your company image, sacrifice your customer service, or you'll have to eventually upgrade to a paid service because the free hosting won't support your needs.
Because search engines now look for certain characteristics of web sites that many free web hosts do not possess, your customers may not find you when they perform a Google or Yahoo search. Web designers are now incorporating search engine optimization strategies in their design elements and free web hosts simply do not have the resources to support these new tools.
Search engine optimization strategies require savvy coding. You can't, like in the old days, just write up an HTML page with your trusty HTML editor and FTP it to your host, then wait for the visitors to come. People go online to look for information and they expect to find the best information available. The search engines make that search possible and have figured out how to make searches easier and more trustworthy for searchers. The job of a web designer is to figure out how to design their pages well enough to give search engines the information they need to help searchers find their pages. Free web hosts are more of an obstacle to that end than a help.
If you want a web site that you can be proud of and that visitors will find, do yourself a favor. Don't use free web hosts.
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