Free and paid web hosting services can both be great to be used in many ways. If you have decided to start your very first website and looking to understand further about the difference between free and paid hosting, the best answer is to first understand what you need and then compare the pros and cons of these two.

Free web hosting

The free web hosting is simply a great way for people to start learning to build their first website. Because of inexperience and uncertainty, you might not want to invest into a paid hosting, at least until you have understand well enough how does web hosting and website works.

The benefits of free hosting is as what the words describe, you get your website hosted for free. This provides you the stepping-stone to learn whatever you need about how your website works for free. You risk no money but only your time and effort if anything happens to your website on a free hosting service.

The downside of free hosting however gives more teething problems as you would experience. Among the main disadvantages of free web hosting is the limited space and bandwidth available, which is very crucial for anyone building a serious website. The email service and FTP access may also not be available. You may also be getting a very lengthy domain URL which takes away the uniqueness of your website. And one of the most annoying thing that you’ll probably find in free web hosting is the imposed of advertisement on your website. But the more significant drawback of free hosting would be the lack of support service when you really need one. But it wouldn’t really be a priority for beginners that are learning to build a simple static site.

Paid service

If you don’t want to invest all your time into creating a website that have the risk of disappearing along with the web host, a paid service would be a wiser choice. Paid service ranges from many types of packages you can get. But the benefits of a paid hosting would include the entire features that are not available on free hosting that include email and FTP, more space and bandwidth and removal of imposed advertisement.

Paid service will also include additional features such as auto-responder, traffic stats, control panel features, anti virus and multimedia features. Nonetheless different paid web hosting package has different value for people. The more significant value of a paid hosting would be a reliable support service. As a person gets more serious into web business, he might want to expand and upgrade to a more secure web hosting service such as dedicated servers or VPS.