Is web hosting really free?
A free hosting service for your e-commerce’s web site can sound be a dream come true. You get abundant space to set up a web site and customer service to boot. However, there are some potential pitfalls to opting for free hosting.
Many free hosting servers don’t have vast data backup. This means that if something happens to your host’s server, you can lose a trove of customer data. Sure, you can backup this data on your own, but babysitting your free hosting service will waste a lot of your time and energy — resources which you could bill to clients and/or use to nurture your company.
Moreover, free hosting companies may have design and expansion limitations. You may develop good initial responses with auto responders and data cachets only to discover a few months down the line that your site is bursting at the britches, slowing down due to volume traffic, and running aground of design and engineering flaws.
Sure, you can spruce up your site or even add data caches to it to make it functional for larger projects, but if your start with a shoddy product, you can almost certainly expect maintenance glitches and trouble spots to emerge.
Remember, a free hosting operation often requires that you put in a lot of the elbow grease to get your site up and running. Sure, a turnkey hosting approach may cost more, but, by putting your site into the hands of professionals, you free up your time, and you gain a certain peace of mind. Thus, when choosing between free hosting and turnkey services, look not just at the cost benefit calculus associated with your company’s short-term projections but also at your five-year schedule.
This isn’t to say that free hosting services are necessarily bad — they are just typically more feeble and vulnerable. When you are making an edifice to serve customers, your client relationships are at stake. So, if you lose data, founder on orders, or otherwise hamper your business development as a result of some kind of free hosting gaff, you pay not just the costs of lost business but also the costs of permanently dented relationships.