Logically, free web hosting will not be able to offer as many features and service compared to a paid web hosting. However, even within free web services, there are a number of web hosting providers which are better than the rest.
The decision of going with a free web hosting to launch one's website is a new experience for many, and there are some key factors which one need to take into consideration when it comes to make your choice for a suitable free web host for your website. Some of the key considerations which need to be emphasized for free web hosting service are: customer service, technical support, extensibility and functionality and many more.
Let us review these key factors for selection of free web hosting in detail to understand the significance for each of them clearly.
a. Customer service -
Check out the quality of the customer service as provided by the free web host provider through online web hosting review, or seek opinions from any of their existing customers. Even a free web host should have a comprehensive plan as of how they can offer their best customer service and support for their clients to sustain their existing clients for an extended period of time.
b. Extensibility -
This refers to the level of expandability and extensibility your free web hosting provider is in supporting any additional service or functionalities. This is especially crucial especially when your customers' website and online business started to grow and they are looking for ways to expand their business, increase their web-pages, extended their disk space and even to increase their bandwidth to accommodate for increase online traffic into their website. Any established free web company which is more than 5 years in this industry normally are more extensible in their support as compared to new comers into this field.
c. Functionality -
Some of the areas of functionalities which need to be thoroughly review through are -
• Downloading: what's the cycle time of having any materials from the website into your computer and how easy would that likely get to be done?
• Additional features: Other than those basic features which are already there, are there any additional features which can be offered to their clients in their time of needs. Some of these features might be some kind of web-based software to zip up some very extensively huge files while downloading, anyway to increase the number of the emails which can be activated through one single hosting account.
• Ease of maintenance: one of the most important question being: check out if the control panel is easy to be handled and what is the chance of you getting access into the control panel. What are the key elements of control are you specifically looking out for in the control panel?
o Other than the control panel, the website server need to be maintain periodically and it can be very trouble-some for many. Thus, before you decided to go with a free web hosting, getting a clearer picture as of how the maintenance activities are to be carried out in future is a wise action to do.
• Get to know the SLA of the free web host company: Find out more on the SLA ( number of days) which the web host had preset in their process for escalated issues and defects to be settled with their root cause. On the other hand, we might also want to validate their actual records from the history trail. If records show that they took > 72 hours to settle for a severity 2 defect versus the SLA of 48 hours, then this web company is not the right choice for you especially if you are expecting for high quality technical support to best support your online customers for greater customer experience!
If you want a reliable web host, there is nobody else who can do a better job than Hostgator hosting. Why? It is not only about their 99.9% uptime. They are much more than that. You should learn about it from Hostgator user reviews.
Darren is a full time web developer for years. Due to the nature of his expertise he has accumulated great experience on web hosting. Do check out his says about web host.
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