Should You Use Free Web Hosting for Your Personal Website?

Would you rather pay for your web hosting or get it for free?

It sounds like a rather idiotic question…right? I mean, who wouldn’t want a free hosting provider, free domain, and free web space?

My guess is as good as yours… nobody!

We all love free stuff. In fact, if we were being honest, we’d probably want to enjoy free stuff every passing day. Free Wi-Fi. Free food. Free furniture. Free beer. 🍻

Heck, we’d even want a free pass in life if it was remotely possible. That way, we’d never have to pay for anything in our lives.

So it’s only natural that you’d be curious about whether it’s a good idea to use free web hosting for your personal web page. Let’s talk about free website hosting for your site and how good or bad it is for your personal blog.

Getting Started…

You’ve got the perfect plan. You’re going to start your own personal webpage and have some fun with it while you see where things go from there on out.

Maybe after some time, you can turn it into a business website and make some money out of it. But you still can’t decide whether you should look into free web hosting companies or not for your site.

Here’s the blatant truth: Paid web hosting certainly its place in this world. However, the reality is, not everyone wants to spend big bucks on a web hosting service—especially if it’s for a personal website or blog.

That said, I’ve put together this quick guide that will show you whether you should use free web hosting for your personal web page to reduce the website development costs. Sound good? Then let’s get to it.

Before I hit you with what I think, let’s talk for a minute about what a web hosting is and why it’s important to have one in the first place.

Related Read: How to Monetize a Website

In a nutshell, web hosting is the place where individual website owners and business website owners store their files to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web.

There are literally thousands of web hosting services available today, but only a fraction of them are worth mentioning. We review the best web hosts in Canada here.

There’s no sense in operating a website if half the time it’s going to be characterized by a weak web server.

And unstable connections for your site—even if it’s a free website.

Uptime Reliability

Keep in mind that your website’s end users are often in a hurry to browse through your site and buy in a hurry. As such, they want the utmost convenience as they use your site. You’ll want to be sure that your website is going to be 100% reliable or come close to it.

The beauty of web hosting is that it provides you with an uptime guarantee on web services. Sure, it might not be 100% but it will probably post a healthy reliability of 99.999%, which is close enough. Therefore, your website will rarely go down.

Considering that 47% of your website’s end users will only stick around for two to three seconds for the website to load, I’d say that speed is definitely something that you don’t want to mess with.

In fact, I’ll go on a leap here and say that it is the most important factor when it comes to determining a website’s success. Don’t believe me? The numbers never lie and neither do I. 😉

If you’re looking to improve your website’s speed, then there’s no better way to do so than to use a fast web hosting service. It’s important to ensure that you host your site with a quality hosting provider, not only to boost up your website’s speed but also to get it back online quickly should it ever happen to go down.

If you’re just starting out with your website, you probably have the misconception that it’s all going to be about dishing out content and getting your audience to read that content. This is only partially true…

And your misconception is well founded considering that you probably hear it being said in every corner that content is king.

(Haven’t we had enough already? 🙉)

More than just dishing out content, your audience might also feel the need to give feedback. The problem is, not everyone will be for the idea of leaving feedback on the site. This means you might actually miss a chance to get valuable feedback if you don’t have an alternative feedback channel.

One of the perks of using a web host is that you get to have options. This makes it easier for your audience to sort of just wheel in and leave their feedback.

I don’t think I need to tell you just how dangerous the Internet landscape has become. From increased cyberattacks to ever-more-clever web crawlers, your security could quite easily be compromised if you’re not careful.

The purpose of a web hosting provider is to ensure that risks are avoided. Often, they’ll provide regular web data backup to help ensure your website is protected at all times.

While the day will likely never come when you’ll need multiple personal blogs (until we start cloning humans 👯 … okay, maybe that day is almost here), there’s no denying that many businesses often own multiple websites.

Normally you wouldn’t be able to add another domain.

However, nearly every good web hosting provider offers hosting packages that allow you to run multiple websites.  So, should anything change in future, you’ll have no trouble adding another domain.

I won’t beat around the bush here… As long as you are operating a website and getting traffic on a daily basis, there are bound to be hiccups and a few issues surrounding web performance. And when the problems arise, you’ll need a little bit of help from your friends.

One of the perks of [quality] web hosting is that you get to enjoy around-the-clock assistance every day every time something does go wrong. In fact, most web hosting providers have a team just waiting to help you out when a problem arises.

Now, on to the juicy part…