Key Takeaways
- Free hosting vs paid hosting is a difficult business choice to make.
- Free hosting offers web hosting at no cost at the expense of performance, reliability, and security.
- Paid hosting offers high performance, security, customer support, and reliability to varying degrees, depending on how much is paid.
- Free hosting is ideal for hobbyists and personal portfolio hosting, as these have no commercial goals.
- Paid hosting is best for any commercial use. You must spend money on hosting to make money from your website.
- The paid vs free hosting debate boils down to whether you prioritize cost savings or website performance.
- It is perfectly normal to start with free hosting and transition to paid hosting when possible.
Choosing a web host is a difficult decision these days, with hundreds and thousands of options available. Everything from shared hosting to dedicated servers and cloud hosting is part of the equation. But even before getting that far into the decision, the first choice is free hosting vs paid hosting.
In this blog, we will review the state of free hosting vs paid hosting in 2024. By comparing the two in various areas of relevance, business owners can gain some much-needed perspective before deciding. Web hosting is a critical business decision; a poor choice can make or break a company.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What Is Free Hosting?
- What Is Paid Hosting?
- Free vs Paid Web Hosting: Which is Best for You?
- Conclusion
- FAQs
What Is Free Hosting?
Free hosting is when a web hosting company provides free access to web domains and hosting. Small businesses, startups, and personal bloggers are the primary audience for free hosting. Free hosting is typically considered an extremely budget choice to get a business up and running before money can be spared for paid hosting.
Free hosting is extremely limited, with clearly defined network bandwidth caps and traffic capacity. It is also not ideal for brand recognition, as free hosting providers include their brand name in the URL for advertisement. The ideal use case for free hosting is to create an easy-to-share information hub. Professional portfolios, for example, are commonly created with free web hosting.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Web Hosting
Nothing is truly free without a trade-off, and free hosting is no different. Listed below is a collection of advantages and disadvantages of free hosting to illustrate the cost of free hosting:
What Is Paid Hosting?
Paid hosting is when you pay a fee for a web hosting services provider to host your website on their dedicated servers. Paid hosting is the recommended hosting solution for commercial use, as businesses need the extra server power and growth opportunities that come with premium hosting.
Paid hosting is for everyone and can be used for any reason. Paid hosting providers offer various hosting plans that allow for all manners of use, from lightweight application hosting to heavy-traffic brand websites.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Paid Web Hosting
Paid web hosting comes with some great perks for the price. Highlighted below are some of the notable pros and cons associated with paid hosting:
Free vs Paid Web Hosting: Which is Best for You?
Image Credit: Freepik
Paid hosting is the recommended choice for business use. There is simply too much depending on the website’s success to not pay a relatively small fee for more robust hosting. Nevertheless, free hosting may prove sufficient for some business use. Let’s compare the two directly to help you decide which is best for your needs.
The Cost of Free Hosting
The fact of the matter is that free hosting is not exactly free. Just because free web hosting providers do not receive monetary compensation from clients does not mean they are giving away servers without taking anything in return. The free hosting model exchanges non-monetary benefits for hosting provision.
Examples include placing advertisements on client websites to earn ad revenue, none of which goes to the client, and using the website URL to self-advertise. Free hosting providers also often provide a free option to give clients a taste and then nudge them towards switching to a premium plan.
Businesses need to be aware of these alternative costs they are paying for a monetarily free hosting server. All such uncommon costs are not included with paid hosting. Paid hosting gives you a server or space on a server and lets you use it without interference. There is no compulsion to run advertisements, the payment is done directly, and terms are clearly laid out in a contract or agreement.
If you are okay with paying through advertisements, then free hosting is perfectly fine for your needs. Personal blogs and hobbyist websites not designed for commercial use can get by very easily with free hosting.
Server Hardware Quality
Free hosting is free for a reason. Servers used for free hosting typically have drastically worse hardware than paid servers. Users can expect at most for their free hosting solutions to work most of the time at mediocre speeds and with limited space. These servers typically run HDDs for storage, which take much longer to read and write data, and the network bandwidth is also metered and limited.
Most paid hosting solutions are far more robust than any free hosting solution. Even paying a couple of dollars for shared premium hosting can net you the semi-latest hardware that outclasses free hosting.
This is not a slight against free hosting, as naturally, providers cannot sustainably provide high-quality hardware for no money. It is just a reality that business owners and individuals need to be aware of during decision-making.
You cannot opt for free hosting and expect to be given access to the latest Intel and AMD CPUs. At best, you will get a chip from a decade ago in your free server, which is still very usable but far from the best you can get. Paid hosting is the way to go if you want the latest hardware and features. Many new technologies can’t even run on outdated components, which is another reason to avoid free hosting.
Want to know what server hardware you need for your business? Check out our recent beginner’s guide to server hardware and empower yourself to make the right choice.
Customization and Personalization
Free hosting allows for minimal customization and personalization on the server level. While you can use and customize the look of your website using the provided templates, there is little to do beyond that. Free hosting restricts you from making server-level changes and often only allows access to the website’s backend for basic configuration.
For developers, free hosting is very difficult to work with as it only allows certain standard web stacks to be used. Custom software and databases are also forbidden from installation. What you see is what you get with free hosting, being able to customize the surface-level features without in-depth personalization.
Premium hosting plans vary in customizability. Cheaper plans restrict customization to certain parameters, while more expensive dedicated hosting allows for complete control.
Generally, paid hosting lets you use CMS like WordPress to customize your website beyond pre-made themes. It depends on what you pay for with paid hosting. Shared hosting, for example, is paid hosting but much more limited as the server is shared between clients.
In a shared hosting situation, there is little you can do to change server configuration as it will affect everyone, not just you. Similarly, a cloud-hosting environment is also limited in customizability. You can change a lot but will not have access to the root to make fundamental changes. Such customizability is only present if you pay the high costs for a dedicated server.
Technical Support
Free hosting services typically do not provide additional technical support. They offer basic tutorials and guides on setting things up, but you will have trouble directly connecting to any human customer support. This is fine for the most part, as these services do not offer access to server features that need such a level of support. It becomes a problem, however, if your website starts acting up for no evident reason.
Consider a situation where you have configured your free-hosted website successfully and have been running it for a while with no issues. One day, the website suddenly goes offline, or your themes stop working correctly. Any such issues are largely left to the user to solve in free hosting. Some providers provide access to direct support for a fee, but paying for support defeats the purpose of free hosting.
Paid hosting always comes with dedicated customer support. The level of support you receive varies with your hosting plan, but at minimum, you can receive some form of human assistance.
This is an immense contributing factor to why businesses use paid hosting. They cannot afford to let technical issues halt operations. If something goes wrong, it needs to be fixed. Every minute the website is down means the business is losing money. Having robust technical support on standby is a defense against the unpredictable.
Cybersecurity
Free web hosting is far less secure than paid web hosting. You get the bare minimum standard security features with free hosting. These are enough for small projects and short-term use but insufficient for brand websites that attract high traffic volumes.
Paid hosting services guarantee a certain level of server security. The physical data centers are well-protected, and sophisticated web protocols and access control features are integrated to prevent data breaches. Standard paid web hosting plans include features like firewalls, SSL certificates, and other cybersecurity support.
Website Performance and Speed
Free hosting cannot deliver the performance and speeds of paid hosting plans. Free hosting is free because it offers passable services but is far from optimal. Some free hosting services even have quite good performance and speed delivery, but it is very rare for free hosting to outperform paid hosting.
Free hosting can be disastrous for businesses as they are not operating in a vacuum. To survive, businesses must beat the competition, which means having faster and better websites. We have all been in a situation where we visited an online store and left for a competitor because it took too long to load. It’s a common consumer experience and an important lesson for businesses.
If your website is not running at comparable speeds to everyone else, you will fall behind and lose the competitive race. This is a key consideration when choosing hosting for your business. You must ask yourself whether your business niche can thrive with the passable performance from free hosting. Are the cost savings worth the competitive risks?
Reliability
Paid hosting is reliable; clients can expect minimal to no web server downtime. Only in extreme cases like natural disasters where it becomes impossible to maintain uptime does dedicated hosting fail completely. If something fails, providers are accountable and responsible for fixing it and upholding their end of the service agreement.
No such provisions exist with free hosting services. You have to sacrifice server reliability for the free hosting experience. Maintaining and providing zero downtime costs a lot of money, and the free hosting model is not designed for it.
Providers make it abundantly clear on sign-up that there is no promise of reliability. If there is one, it is not up to the standard of minimal downtime. Some free hosting services can take days, if not weeks, to recover from major failures. It must be reiterated that this is only the case due to the nature of free hosting. Paid hosting can only provide good reliability because they charge you for it.
In terms of reliability without any direct payment, free hosting is better than it has ever been. Technology is so robust now that very little can fail, and fail-safes often prevent serious setbacks. For most, free hosting will be reliable enough to complete the job. The only concern is that they can take a long time to fix things if things go wrong.
Search Engine Rankings
Free web hosting is not good for SEO ranking. Search engines don’t like websites with ads that get in the way of the content. They also take a record of the domain name and URL, which can negatively affect the SEO score. Good SEO practices also demand high-quality images, which may not be usable with limited storage.
Free hosting comes with too many roadblocks that negatively impact search engine rankings. If you want your content to rank highly, you need paid hosting with a custom domain and robust server specs to compete with the best. This does not mean it is impossible to rank with free hosting, only that it is substantially more difficult.
Here is a summary table of the free hosting vs paid hosting debate:
Conclusion
We have tried our best to provide a fair picture of what you can expect when comparing free hosting vs paid hosting.
As far as choosing between them goes, it is still a difficult choice. Even if paid hosting is better for most uses, there are still cases where free hosting can get the job done and save money. With how bad inflation has gotten, any savings are good savings. Free hosting is easily the choice if the website or project is not critical and just needs the bare minimum hosting support.
Sticking to paid dedicated hosting services like RedSwitches for long-term use is best. RedSwitches combines the best of both worlds, bringing some of the most robust dedicated server hosting to businesses at highly affordable prices. For as low as €40/month, businesses can gain access to their own dedicated servers with round-the-clock technical support and guaranteed uptime.
Ultimately, the choice is yours. You need to decide whether cost savings or long-term competitive performance are what you want from web hosting. Let us know which you end up choosing and why!
FAQs
Q. What is the primary difference between free hosting and paid hosting?
The main difference between paid and free hosting is the cost of each service. As the name suggests, free hosting services offer free, accessible web hosting options. Paid hosting comes in various hosting plans with different perks and services depending on how much you pay.
Q. Is free hosting as reliable as paid hosting?
While free hosting can get the job done and is reliable enough for most use cases, it is less reliable than paid hosting. There are no uptime guarantees, and issues can take a long time to resolve. The reliability of paid hosting is a major reason businesses opt for it.
Q. What kind of support can I expect with free hosting?
Free hosting typically offers minimal or no customer support. Nowadays, the common practice is to provide access to an AI chatbot that can answer major questions and concerns. Human assistance is rare with free hosting plans.
Q. Will free hosting providers place ads on my site?
Many free hosting providers place ads on client websites to cover the hosting costs. Think of ads on your website as your way of paying them. Free hosting is free because you are not paying; advertisers pick up the bill instead.
Q. Can I use my own domain name with free hosting?
You can use your choice of domain name, but more likely than not, it will be used as part of a sub-domain. The provider will use your website URL to market themselves, affecting the brand image.
Q. How long can I use free hosting?
Free hosting services may have limitations on duration and can change their terms or shut down with little notice. Paid hosting offers more stability and long-term reliability.
Q. What are the storage and bandwidth limitations of free vs paid hosting?
Free hosting still costs money to run and typically limits network and storage use to stay sustainable. Paid hosting offers varying levels of bandwidth and storage space, and you can pay for what you need.
Q. What are the security differences between free and paid hosting?
Paid hosting offers better security features like SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and regular backups. Free hosting may lack these advanced security measures.
Q. Can I upgrade from free hosting to paid hosting later?
Most free providers also have paid plans. The point of a free plan is to give customers a taste of web hosting before nudging them towards premium upgrades. If the free hosting service has no paid options, then the free server data can still be migrated to a paid server, but it will be a complex process.
Q. Should I use free hosting for my e-commerce website?
Free website hosting is a bad choice for e-commerce websites. E-commerce is highly competitive and needs top-tier website performance for success. The high performance, security, and customizability of paid hosting are best for e-commerce use.
