Free hosting resources are limited
Paid professional hosting companies like Bluehost, which is well known and its no less famous sister company, HostGator, and others offer unlimited or very huge hosting resources in terms of file storage and bandwidth.
Conversely, free web hosts offer very limited resources, and to get more resources, you will have to upgrade your hosting package to paid hosting for an additional fee.
Or you will be forced to delete some old files from your site or your site will often be down and your hosting company may permanently delete your site for misuse of the service.
Therefore, free web hosting is not suitable for hosting a professional website that has the potential to grow in terms of content and number of visitors and your effort may be lost at any time unfortunately without warning.
Paid hosting comes with free technical support
Whatever your level of experience or knowledge of hosting and server management, you will undoubtedly need to contact hosting technical support at some point.
The fact that free web hosting providers don't provide technical support to users means that by using free web hosting, you are only on your own to solve problems that may arise with the hosting.
In contrast, almost all paid hosts offer instant customer support service available all the time via free phone, live chat, or technical support tickets to help users and solve technical hosting issues they may encounter.
Free hosting comes with limited control
Unlike paid hosting, which comes with a lot of control over your hosting and settings, free hosting gives you very limited control over your hosting settings.
For example, free hosting uses its own 404 error pages that contain the hosting company's own information and links.
And those pages appear on your site when a visitor visits a page or link that is not on your site, and that page is supposed to include the site’s logo and links to it, such as the link to the home page of the same site and not the hosting company’s site.
In addition, we find that many features and settings are not available in free hosting, especially the advanced features that sites need to provide a better user experience for their visitors and make managing the site easier for the site manager himself.
Whereas in paid hosting, we find that the user gets complete control over their website and hosting account settings.
For example, the user can design custom error pages that include the information and links he wants as he wants to appear to visitors to the site when the visitor tries to access a page that does not exist.
Free web hosting is not really free!
Providing a hosting service requires significant financial expenses and investments, and hosting companies are for-profit companies, not charitable organizations. For these companies to continue offering free web hosting to customers, they need to earn money to at least cover their operating expenses.
And if the web hosting company does not get that money from you directly, it will definitely get it indirectly. Compulsory ads!
If the company does not charge you finance fees for using the hosting, it will certainly display advertisements on your site that appear to visitors to the site without any intervention from you and without even giving you any share of the revenues of those advertisements or even controlling the display of advertisements.
And with very little or no control over the ads your hosting displays on your website pages, you're unfortunately in a vulnerable position.
Simply, what if the hosting displays an advertisement for a competitor's site for your site or any other advertisement that contains inappropriate images, for example, or inappropriate for the site's content. What will you do?
Free hosting won't last forever
To be realistic, there is no guarantee that a free web hosting company will last for a long time, especially if it does not generate enough financial returns to keep it going.
From our experience on the website and our continuous follow-up of free and paid hosting companies over the years, we can tell you that free hosting does not last long, unfortunately. Either the company switches to paid hosting and stops the free service, or the company closes its doors permanently and stops working, often without warning.
In short, if for some reason your free web hosting company doesn't stop working which is a common occurrence, your site is at risk of going down due to the free hosting itself not working!
Paid web hosting is faster than free
Currently, website speed is one of the most important factors in the success of any website and is closely related to attracting and retaining visitors and improving the user experience.
We are in the age of speed and no one likes to wait for a website page to load slowly while other sites are in the search results.
Paid hosts such as A2Hosting and Dreamhost are competing with each other to provide a fast hosting service that meets the needs of users, which is something we do not see in free hosting, unfortunately.
With free hosting stuffing servers with many sites and not caring about using modern hardware and powerful software, we find that unfortunately, free hosting is slow which leads to increased loading time for websites hosted on free services.
Therefore, it is necessary to use paid hosting if you care about your site and its success, and some hosts offer professional paid hosting at low prices such as image hosting which comes with great hosting resources, and Namecheap hosting which comes at significantly discounted prices and also the inter-server company Inter-Server which is famous for offering cheap web hosting servers.
Paid hosting is easier to use
Ease of use is one of the most important things that users are looking for, especially beginners who want to manage their hosting easily and without complication.
Paid hosting services come with powerful and easy-to-use hosting control panels at the same time, on top of which is the cPanel that most large hosting companies use, such as the well-known Godaddy and GreenGeeks hosting, which provides environmentally friendly hosting, in addition to the company Inmohosting and the emerging web hosting company, Fast.-Comet and many others.
The disadvantage of cPanel is that there is a monthly usage fee that is calculated based on the number of users on the server, which adds more costs to the hosting company and leads to a higher price for cPanel hosting compared to the hosting company using a free or own control panel.
This prompted some hosts to develop their own control panels, such as Kinsman, which offers managed WordPress hosting and uses a control panel from its own development to make creating and managing a WordPress site an easy and uncomplicated task.
There are no free web hosting companies that offer free cPanel hosting because the service itself is free and the hosting company cannot charge a license fee to use a paid control panel like cPanel.
Therefore, these companies tend to use free hosting control panels that are weak and difficult to use compared to their paid counterparts, and some free hosting are developing their own panels as well, which are not as powerful as the paid ones.
Therefore, we find that controlling and managing paid hosting is much easier than its free counterpart, despite the power of the paid hosting control panel and the presence of many advanced tools and settings in it. This makes it easier for you to manage the site and hosting and gives you more time to do the basic things about the site itself.
Free web hosting is less secure than paid
Websites are exposed to cyber-attacks and hacking attempts regularly. Cyberattacks cost the global economy around $1 trillion annually.
Whatever the size of your site, it is not far from hacking attempts, as there are programs dedicated to crawling the Internet and searching for security holes in various websites to exploit them, let alone if your site itself is specifically targeted by hackers!
A large part of the security and protection of your site depends on the security of the website hosting itself, so it is necessary to use a strong hosting company that places great importance on security and protection, such as the hosts with big names in the market like HostMonster and its less popular sister in the market JustHost.
In this particular point, paid hosting is significantly superior to free hosting as paid hosting is considered much more secure than free hosting, which does not attach much importance to the security of users' sites.
Suppose you care about the security and protection of your site and the security of your users and their data. In that case, we strongly advise you to avoid using free web hosting as much as possible and to keep external backups of your site data regularly.
Conclusion: Paid hosting is better than free hosting
Free hosting might seem like a very good option for, those who hate free stuff!
However, you should look at the overall picture and understand that free hosting is not only suitable for learning and experience purposes but from our point of view at topweb4all. Without warning!
You may think that you will save a lot of money if you use free hosting, but in reality, you will find that you are losing in other ways. You may find that you spend more time solving hosting issues than you spend developing the site itself, and your entire business may be lost at any time if the hosting decides to delete your site for any reason as mentioned above.
So we advise you to buy good paid web hosting if you want your site to succeed or the goal of creating it is to get any moral or material returns.