Sunday, January 11, 2009

Considerations when Choosing Free Web Hosting

By Theodore Metagastar

Thinking about starting your own website? The good news is that free web hosting is available at many sites. There are many things to consider before you make this decision and investing your time and energy in building your site.

Why do you want a website? Is it for connecting with your friends, and making new friends? Social networking is a big industry these days, with many sites such as Facebook and MySpace. You can easily invite and connect with your people.

Having an online photo album is another good reason to start a website. There are many photo posting resources available these days, such as Flicker.

Most of the free web space hosts have additional features to enhance and customize your website, such as templates for the appearance. Add on features include features like linking, photo upload, and comment sections where others can remark on your postings.

If you are interested in displaying Adsense advertisements and possibly generate a little revenue to support your website then you might consider Blogspot. This site is owned by Google, and they do allow Adsense ad blocks to be shown on these sites.

One key part of having a website is the identity, and the domain name is a big part of that. When you use a free web space host your site location, the address used to find you on the web, will be a combination of your unique name and the host site. One example is a site hosted on blogspot: http://atravel-adventure.blogspot.com. , which has their own name integrated with the hosts name.

If you are dead set on having your own domain name, one likehttp://afreewebspace.com, , you will need to arrange for a hosting service, which steps you out of the free hosting level into paid hosting. The great thing about paid hosting is that you can host multiple sites and will have greater latitude in what features you can have for your site. Your own site can be set up with basic html pages, or use a content management system, which we will discuss in our next article.

One thing for sure, if you find that your free web space is not going to give you all the features you would like, you can always change to another site. Youre not out any money, just your time. You can keep your free site up and running and link to your new site.

One good thing about having a free web space is that you have storage off site for your photos and ideas. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard someone praise their online free web site for keeping their precious photos when they suffer a computer crash or otherwise lose data.

Free web space hosting is here to stay. Isnt it time you start your own website?

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