What I’ll be covering in this article on how to Create a Website For Free is the topic of “free web hosting” and I’ll be outlining some of the benefits and disadvantages of using such hosts. If you are new to the world of website building and want to create a website for free and find a web host for free, then this may be of value to you.
Benefits:
It is probably okay to have your website hosted for free provided that it is for personal use only. It is fine for initially learning how to upload and download your website files and using their FPT software. (File Transfer Protocol.) You will normally be allocated a set amount of space (about 20 MB – sometimes more), which is plenty to start off with.
Some free web hosts (like the ones I’ll mention later) include add-ons such as:
- Guest Book
- 404 Error Pages
- Counters
- Feedback Forms
- Survey Forms
There are those that also give your new website some free promotion. These benefits are basically fine for beginners when creating websites for free.
If you use Lycos free web hosting you will get your new website indexed within a couple of days – believe it or not. That is because they heavily use Google Ads that surrounds your website and that are based on your content. This is how the free web hosting companies make their money from you – through Pay Per Click advertising. Of course, where your website is ranked/positioned will depend on your competition and on the nature and quality of you website content. Lycos free web hosting is however, very easy to use – especially for a beginner.
To be fair, I started off by using them myself and learned a helluva lot – I even made some money selling stuff but there are some serious disadvantages…
Some of The Downsides:
As I have stated, I started out by using them myself but one of the major problems that I had with them (one in particular – Lycos) was the amount of downtime, which was normally due to maintenance – and it nearly always seemed to be at the beginning of the weekend; that’s when people find time to surf the net – what a bummer that was. The thing is you can’t complain because it’s all down to larkins. (Free) Which makes it really worth as much as you pay for it? If you get a problem and need to contact them – well forget about it. I tried endlessly and all to no avail on many occasions. They never bothered to reply to my emails. (They do provide a half decent paid hosting service, as I have used them a few years back. They’re not great, but they’re okay.)
Some years ago (when I was using Lycos Free web hosting) I had a website owner who completely plagiarised by website (literally word for word) as I’d taken the number one spot on Google, and so I threatened to take action against him. He had a dot com website and instead, contacted my free web host and told them a bunch of out and out lies to which they blocked my website immediately.
They did not even give me a single chance to reply to their email as it would be returned “fatal error – mailer daemon”. I do understand Lycos’ position on this, as they don’t want anyone using their free web hosting service for anything unethical and don’t want to get their name mixed up with it. But that doesn’t help you or me if we are in the right and are in a right old fix.
I later contacted Google, Yahoo, MSN, ClickBank and Nochex (under the DMCA -Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and sent them all my documentation and affidavits and they totally killed him off the net – even to today. If I’d had a paid host I would have been able to explain the situation and have it dealt with in a proper fashion, but unfortunately with Lycos, I didn’t have a leg to stand on as it was free hosting; they just cut my site off.
Another thing is that some free web hosts like Lycos, use very intrusive pop-up adverts, which is very annoying to visitors and an absolute killer for any site – especially a business website. I’m not kidding; some of their adverts can completely cover your entire web page! This leaves the visitor to click on the ‘back-button’ and end up giving your website a complete miss – and rightly so.
Let’s face it; what right-minded customer will take your business seriously if they think that you cannot even afford to pay for your own web hosting?
You will also be limited to how and what you name your website and it is likely to be a very log-winded URL as well, such as this example: [http://www.members.freehost.co.uk/yourdomainname]”>[www.members.anyfreehost.co.uk/yourdomainname (who’s gonna remember that?)
Conclusion:
You may wish to use Tripod.com (as they have free web hosting as well) and they have some decent web templates too. They are however, quite difficult to edit and amend for someone who is new to website building. Their finished websites do have a professional ‘look and feel’ to them though. Tripod also uses Google ads, but are much better positioned (at the top and bottom of your new website) and they aren’t obtrusive and do not overlap your website content as does those at Lycos.
So you now know what some of the benefits and disadvantages are of using free web hosting. As I have stated earlier, it is probably okay to use them for experimenting as a beginner and not to use it for any kind of business use – not if you want to be taken seriously. I hope that this article on how to create a website for free by using free web host services has been informative and useful to you.
Best wishes and good luck.
