Is Free Web Hosting A Viable Option?

Free web hosting is something that many people choose when first starting out online for one reason and one reason only - the price. But is free web page hosting worth it, in either the short or long term?The rise of free web hosting services in recent years proves that there is without doubt huge demand for no cost hosting and there has been no shortage of companies and marketers keen to tap into what is seen as such a lucrative market.The first companies offering free hosting were able to do so by using advertising revenues to offset their costs and usually, to turn free hosting into a profitable venture for themselves.For you, the consumer, such a tempting offer was hard to resist. The reality of building a site on a free hosting account however, often turned into a rather frustrating and sometimes worthless end user experience.The early pioneers were often hastily set up and after they had raked in the money, users often found themselves high and dry when the free hosting provider went offline overnight, never to return. The fact that users were not out of pocket may have cushioned the blow, but all the work customers had done was invariably lost, along with the time invested.For those who signed up with a more stable free hosting company, the downside was usually the ads that they were forced to run on their websites, over which they had no control. These were usually not remotely relevant to the content of the site, and usually so intrusive that visitors would be scared away pretty quickly.  Add to this the fact that free web hosting users were usually stuck with a sub domain name and found it almost impossible to achieve any kind of worthwhile results in the search engines results pages, and free web page hosting started to look far less appealing.Many free web hosting services also left a lot to be desired in the reliability stakes with sites often being offline and unavailable to internet users. This was annoying for many, but to anyone trying to run some kind of online business it was disastrous.Because of all these things, you will doubtless have read in many places that free hosting is really not worth the price you pay, particularly if your site has any commercial aspirations.I would not disagree with this even today, because anyone operating a business online usually needs far more than most free web hosting plans can offer. However, the choices in 2008 are far greater than they have been in the past. Several free hosting providers now offer PHP and MySQL and some pretty decent storage and bandwidth numbers. There are even services that give cPanel access and the ability to host your own domain name. For many people, particularly those on a very tight budget, perhaps free hosting is still worth a look. If you are just looking to host a non commercial website, or perhaps just a place to host marketing squeeze pages and the like, free hosting might well be a viable choice.As with most things, if you get them for free, there is usually a trade off, but the free web hosting industry has certainly improved in recent times and consumer choices are more wide ranging than they once were.