Free hosting vs paid hosting: Which is the best hosting for your website?
Every website on the internet needs web hosting or web hosting. Regardless of the type and content of the site, all websites need hosting and a domain to function and perform the function expected of them.
And finding the best web hosting service is not easy. One of the main reasons behind this is the fact that there are hundreds of global web hosting companies vying for the largest share of the web hosting market and striving to attract as many new users as possible.
The types of web hosting services vary according to their prices, the technologies used, and the users of the hosting service.
The hosting is divided according to the price into two main types which are paid hosting and free hosting.
Free web hosting attracts the attention of many users because it is free who do not like free services and products!
But there are some differences between free hosting and paid hosting that everyone who wants to buy web hosting should be aware of before deciding whether to use free web hosting or paid web hosting.
In this article, we will mention the differences between the free web hosting service and its paid counterpart, so that you can determine which of the two services is best for hosting your website.
Paid web hosting
Paid hosting is the most popular web hosting service that starts at less than $1 per month Hostinger's hosting service for new customers coming from the hosting dean's site and goes up to hundreds or thousands of dollars per month to major web hosting services like Dedicated Server and Cloud Hosting Provided by some companies such as Cloudways.
Paid hosting is a category under which more than one web hosting service falls. There are several types of paid hosting services and not just one, where you can choose from many services such as shared hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, full servers, and even online store hosting, etc.
Besides paid hosting and its different subtypes, there is also a free web hosting service for those who don't want to pay to host their website.
And by free web hosting, we mean completely free hosting. In short, a hosting service that can be used for free, without having to pay any fees or charges to the free hosting company.
But most likely you are now asking yourself the following question: “Why might a company offer free hosting to customers when it can make profits from providing the service by charging customers for its use?”
Simply put, it sounds too good to be true.
There are at least two main reasons why companies offer free hosting, which is that the hosting company makes a direct profit by displaying ads on users' sites. The other reason is to use the free hosting service to promote the company's paid hosting service by urging customers to upgrade to the paid service to get more benefits.
The difference between paid hosting and free hosting
In the following points, the Hosting Dean website team will take a look at the most prominent differences between paid web hosting and free hosting so that you can get an idea of the two services, the advantages, and disadvantages of each, and which one is better for hosting your website.
Paid hosting is more reliable
Reliability is one of the most important things a paid web host has over a free web host.
Generally, free web hosting services do not provide the same uptime as paid web hosting companies. This is because the architecture of the free hosting platform is not at the same level as its paid counterpart. After all, the hosting architecture is not constantly updated to keep pace with new technologies.
Paid to host updates servers and software from time to time in addition to using the best technologies and paid software, which provides the best levels of performance and speed, which is not available in the free hosting due to the large financial cost that this requires.
Free hosting is known for frequent downtime and slow loading of hosted sites, especially when there is an increase in the number of visitors. Therefore, free hosting cannot be relied upon to provide the best performance and speed and to deal with the surges that may occur in the number of visits to your site that may occur as a result of an advertising campaign you are doing, for example.
In contrast, paid hosts to strive to provide the best possible performance and highest page loading speed of websites hosted on their platforms. That is why we find that most paid web hosting companies guarantee your site uptime of 99% or more.
Site ranking in search engine results
All sites want to achieve the largest number of targeted visitors and the most important sources of visitors interested in the content of your site or search results in search engines such as Google and Bing. To get the largest share of the number of searches on search engines, you must outperform your competitors by leading the search results and appearing in the first search results.
Many factors govern the ranking of search results, but it is common knowledge that sites hosted on free hosting get lower rankings in search results than their counterparts hosted on paid site hosting.
This is due to several reasons, including the following.
- Website loading speed is a factor in the site’s ranking in search results, and most sites hosted on free hosting suffer from the slow site as a result of the slow hosting service itself
- Sometimes, free hosts display inappropriate advertisements or malicious links on users' sites which lead to the discredit of the site to the search engine as a malicious site for users.
- Free hosting suffers from long and frequent Downtime, which affects the site's ranking and raises the bounce rate.
- Free hosting is always associated with free domains which are sub-domains, and these sub-domains are notorious for their bad reputation with users and search engines because they are commonly used to create fake websites.
- The hosting IP addresses that are associated with the server on which your site is hosted are shared among many other sites on the same server. Many free sites are notorious and are used for malicious purposes such as sending spam emails, which harm the IP address itself and the sites hosted on it, including your site.
Although using a good paid web hosting does not necessarily mean that your site will appear in the top ranks of search results, it does mean that you will get rid of the problems related to hosting and devote yourself to other factors such as site content, design and other factors that you can read about on sites specialized in SEO.