Free Or Not Free, It's Your Choice

The internet is one of the world's top sources of information, products and just about anything else you could possibly want. And, if you have spent any amount of time online, you must have noticed that much of it is free.

Many home business entrepreneurs get their start online using some of these
free resources. In fact, some of them use freebees almost exclusively.

So, just what are these valuable assets that attract so many home business
newbies? Here are just a few:

1. Email - one can get free email accounts just about anywhere (MSN
Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google GMail, Lycos) plus tons of others. Actually, free
email accounts can be very useful, but that's another article.

2. Autoresponders - there are many free autoresponders (getresponse, and
freeautobot, just to name a few). Some are better than others but they are
a useful tool.

3. EBooks - You can get free ebooks just about anywhere. These can
prove very valuable as giveaways to get people to do some sort of action,
like join your mailing list.

4. Web Space - Free web space abounds throughout the internet. Most
likely, the ISP you signed up with offers web space for free for you to put up
your own personal web site. You can also get free space at places like Yahoo
Geocities, Tripod, Bravenet, plus tons of others.

And the list goes on. However, today I would like to talk about Web Space.
Free Or Not Free, It's Your Choice.

Many home business entrepreneurs, when first starting out, want to keep
expenses to a minimum (I did this myself). Therefore, just after we join one
or two affiliate programs and find out that we can't get the affiliate web page
into the search engines (because there are probably 5 million affiliates with
exactly the same page) we want to build our own site.

Having your own web site is probably one of the most important steps you
can take to get your home business off to a fast start. Taking the time to
find a good web host should be equally as important.

Read that last line again.

Why do I say that? Just think about this.

You have just spent the past two months learning html or how to use a
program like FontPage to build your web site. You've been writing your web
pages, putting in images and links to your affiliate web page and maybe even
have made a few forms to get people to sign up for your own newsletter.

All is well and good so far, because it's still on your computer.

So now you go to find a place that will 'host' your site. And, being the
money conscious person that you are, you look for some place free. Your
internet service provider will give you probably 5 megs of space but will only
let you put up a personal site.

So you decide to give another place a try. Bingo, you've found lots of
places that will let you have space on their servers for free as long as they
can put a banner ad on your web pages. A small price to pay you say and go
ahead and sign up.

Great, now you have your own web site up and running, it's a little slow
loading because of the banner ad but you decide that is OK. Now, in order to
get your site closer to the top of your category in the search engines you
decide to start doing link exchanges. Very good, it shows you have been
doing your homework.

Now it's 4 or 5 months later and your site is on page 5 of the search results,
people are joining your downline and signing up for your newsletter. What a
wonderful thing this internet is.

One day you decide to log into your hosting account and change a few
things on your site. But, what's up, you can't log in. You then decide to go
to the search engine and type in the url of your site. Nothing! Error, the
page you are looking for is not available!!!

Just like that, it's all gone. All your hard work, your only means of getting
affiliate signups and newsletter opt-ins has disappeared. What's up you ask
your web host and they tell you that they have changed their policy and no
longer offer free web space. You're back to square one.

Think it can't happen? Think again. It happened to me.

That's right, all my web pages, articles, newsletter archives, classified ads,
everything gone. And, to make things worse, I have been making changes to
the site at the control panel of the web host and therefore didn't even have a
recent copy of most of the pages on my computer. We live and learn!

Had I known all along how inexpensive it is to get good web hosting service I
would never have gone the free route. To make a long story short, for less
than $5.00 per month you can get excellent web hosting services.

I won't make that mistake again, will you?

Randy Justason