The web hosting market is a competitive one and free web page hosting is as much so as paid hosting. In this post we will discuss the nature of free web hosting and suggest a few companies we know of that offer great service.
What should you look for in a free web hosting company? Unlike shopping for paid hosting where you would go off of pricing as a major factor you have to go by other criteria. You should know if it is ad free hosting or if they do place ads on your web page. You should find out if they use family friendly ads or if you have any control over the content of such ads. You would not want a site for your family and friends to keep up to date on your kids and family and then have random ads with adult content. You should look at what features they have including storage and file transfer.
More than likely you will have ads and banners run on your free web space. There wouldn’t be another way for the company to carry the cost of such a service unless they offer upgrades to paid hosting. All free web hosting is not equal. It is very much like paid hosting where the features differ and you need to find what works for you and what your goals are. If you go to the trouble of building a nice free site and it gets a lot of traffic you will want it to be with a company that will let you upgrade without interruption. This will prevent time consuming moves and rebuilding of your site.
A lot of free web space hosts will offer a website builder. If you don’t have a program or the knowledge to do this for yourself you will definitely want to make sure that they have a good variety of website templates and other options to customize your web space.
We have three favorites for free web hosting:
20m.com – This is an outstanding options that offers a free web space plan but also the ability to move up to a very low cost hosting solution. For the free web hosting they offer 20 MB of web space and 1 GB of file transfer. This also comes with three email accounts. This service does have banner and pop up ads.
150m.com – This is one of the best offers in the industry. You get 100MB of web space, 1.2 GB of file transfer, and FTP access. All of this and there are no banner or pop up ads! They offer low cost web hosting as well and that is what pays for the free web pages.
StormPages – This company gives you the option to pay a small fee to have the ads removed from your site. The basic hosting with StormPages gives you 50 MB of storage, unlimited file transfer and online support.