Free Web Hosting

There are many free website hosting providers around these days, most of them providing an ad-supported free hosting service that allows those who don’t have the budget for a paid web hosting package to host their websites in a standard web hosting environment. Most free web hosts require that you place adverts in your web pages on their behalf, so that they are able to make money to allow them to pay their dedicated server rental fees, and the other fees that are incurred for running a free web hosting business. It is now common knowledge that free web hosting isn’t at all reliable, since the servers used are often insecure making them an easy target for malicious attackers.

Paid web hosts will only normally allow free web hosts to use their VPS or dedicated server hosting services, since free web hosting servers will often attract malicious attackers, and a web hosting provider wouldn’t want their own shared and reseller web hosting servers being put in danger of downtime. cPanel is normally the control panel of choice for free web hosts, since it is easily fixed if it encounters any errors and doesn’t cost much if bought directly from a web hosting provider. cPanel is also an easy control panel to use, meaning that free web hosting users can easily adjust to their web hosting environment, since support isn’t normally provided.

In most cases, you will find free web hosting for Linux only, although you may be able to find Windows based free web hosting if you search enough. The most popular Linux distribution in the web hosting world is called CentOS, and is based on the extermely popular RHEL Linux operating system; other examples of Linux distribution that may be used by a free web hosting provider include Ubuntu, Gentoo and FreeBSD. In the event that you do find a free web host offering free Windows web hosting, they will probably be running Windows Server 2003 along with the Plesk control panel for easy account management.

With a free Linux web hosting account, you will find that you are limited to the number of MySQL databases that you can host, which in most cases is one. Support for PHP on a free Linux web hosting package isn’t guaranteed either, meaning that you should check what you are getting with your free web hosting package before opening an account. With a free Windows hosting account, you will probably find that ASP.NET web pages and scripts aren’t supported, and that you are only allowed to create only one Microsoft SQL Server database, if any.

Free web hosting can be extremely unreliable, and the safety of your account’s contents and personal details isn’t guaranteed either. Free web hosting servers are normally unsafe, and have no firewall to protect them from malicious attackers; this means that if a malicious attacker was to gain access to the server that your free web hosating account was hosted on, the hacker would probably try and make an attempt to steal all of the server’s data. When signing up for a free web hosting account, you are handing over personal details such as your name and email addresss, and even more personal details such as your mailing address in some cases; free web hosts will probably make an attempt to seel this data on at a later point in time, meaning that the safety of your personal details isn’t guaranteed either.

Since free web hosting accounts often go unmonitored, it isn’t uncommon for a free hosting server to be filled with resource hogging accounts that can take their tole on the physical hardware of the physical hosting server. With the mix of resource hogging web hosting accounts and lax security, free web hosting servers often experience downtime meaning that they are extermely unreliable in the service that they provide you and your website with.

If you have a small basic website and don’t want to pay for a traditional web hosting package, then you might want to consider a free web hosting package. However, if you want to send visitors to your website, then you shouldn’t really be using a free web hosting package since you will find your website is down for longer than its up, which is unsuitable for most.