Free hosting or paid hosting?

[brookes]

Hi Friends,

Which one do you prefer free hosting or paid hosting? If you get hosting for free why pay for it? I know that free hosting comes with ads, but still its free.

My thought is, when i am in the development phase of any domain, i will go with free hosting, i will do all my experiments there. Once my website is completely ready, i will move to paid hosting.

What do you guys do? How many or with free hosting how many of you with paid hosting?

cheers
brookes

[lihen]

Free hosting is much better than paid hosting.
yes i agree that some free hosting services come with forced ads and / or banner ads, but there are also some free hosting services which have nither forced ads nor banner ads. They just have their sub domain urls, which can be easily masked by a domain name. eg - www.freehostia.com
so be cleaver use such free hostings and mask them with domain names

[htnho]

I agree we have some free hosting are very good.But it is still free hosting. So your site will die anytime.
Free hosting is good for testing but not good for professional site

[lihen]

i will still recommend to use a good freehosting and mask it with a domain name, i have been doing it for last 2 years and non of my sites died .....
But yes i would also say that freehosting services do not provide full functionality as paid do, but never the less they are enough to run a good site, if you have a good coding skills to make some of the unprovided functions yourself

[Shane]

The only time I have ever found a free host good (in the last like.. 7 years) was when one of my friends was hosting me but it would usually have been $15 per month.

Paid is much etter because you can count on it.

[hellmet]

A few startup webhosts usually give away free hosting and its usually like for one year or something. Keep a watch on offers like those. Anyways, I always prefer cheaper webhosting then completely free coz, I like my domains to be up, especially when one of them has my email too.

[katharina]

Originally Posted by htnho

I agree we have some free hosting are very good.But it is still free hosting. So your site will die anytime.
Free hosting is good for testing but not good for professional site

This is what I'd have to say, too. I haven't even tested with a free site, but when it comes to a professional business site, I just wouldn't use free hosting. Customers would be able to tell that it's free hosting so if your business is catering to customers, I'd truly think twice about going free.

[entre]

I would go with paid hosting. This is just because if you can afford it, paid hosting is the best and safest way to go about it. I know some free hosting offers are really nice, but if you want to be professional you could opt for more.

[sawya]

Paid hosting every time. Just suck it up and pay out the 10 dollars a month, what is that, like less than a McDonalds with apple pie?

[finster]

The free hosting is bare basics ,I think. If you want bells and whistles do with paid. It doesn't have to cost that much. Are there free hosts that let you place your own ads on your site?