Free web hosting might sound like the ideal solution for small businesses and individual websites, but the long-term risks and hidden expenses could be more costly than the few pounds a month in savings. Free hosting often lacks the security, reliability and performance websites need, and there’s limited customer support when problems arise. In this post, we look at the risks of free hosting and explain why premium hosting is essential for long-term success.
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What is free hosting for?
According to Optrium, the cost of running a data centre in the UK is between £10m and £25m a year. Given such a huge outlay, no hosting provider can afford to offer free hosting purely for philanthropic reasons. Usually, it is simply a way to hook new customers and push them towards paid services.
To encourage users to pay for hidden extras or upgrades, free hosting deliberately offers the bare minimum in terms of server resources, security and support and these can cause the following issues:
Bigger risk of cyberattacks
With 7.78 million cybercrimes on businesses between 2023 and 2024 and 81% of them on SMEs, service providers go to great lengths to protect websites, some of them using highly sophisticated and expensive tools. These can include firewalls, intrusion and malware detection tools, spam and phishing filters, encryption, SSL certificates and daily backups – all of which are included in the cost of a standard hosting plan.
Free web hosting does not include these critical protections, making websites easy targets for cybercriminals and much more likely to become victims of malware, ransomware, hacking, phishing attacks and data breaches.
Keep up to date with security, read: Web Hosting Security Threats 2024 – How to Keep Your Website Protected
Limited server resources
Shared hosting is a popular low-cost hosting solution where many websites share the CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth resources of a single server. For small websites with limited traffic, this kind of hosting is often ideal. However, there are significant differences in how shared hosting is managed on paid-for and free plans.
On paid-for plans, the number of user accounts on each server is limited so that more resources are available to each customer. Furthermore, to ensure that a small number of busy websites don’t use up everyone else’s resources, web hosts use modern operating systems, like CloudLinux, that enable dedicated resources to be allocated to every user.
To keep costs to a minimum, free hosts cram users onto individual servers, severely limiting the resources available to each website. Moreover, proprietary operating systems like CloudLinux are shunned in favour of free, open-source alternatives that cannot allocate dedicated resources. As a result, websites can experience slow loading times, sluggish responses to user input and frequent downtime. These, in turn, cause user abandonment and poor search engine rankings, reducing visitor numbers and conversion rates.
Learn more about shared hosting, read: 8 Shared Hosting Features Modern Websites Need
Scalability issues
As successful sites grow and attract more visitors, they often need to upgrade to a larger hosting solution. With a premium hosting provider, this can easily be done through the user account dashboard and if required, the host will assist with the migration to a new solution. Free web hosts will not offer migration assistance, making the operation potentially risky for those lacking technical skills.
File restrictions
To fit more websites on each server, free web hosting offers very limited storage space and restricts the types or sizes of files that can be uploaded. For example, large videos and images and certain kinds of software may not be allowed. Such restrictions can prevent users from creating the content they want and reduce its quality.
Premium web hosting provides more generous storage and there are no limits on the file types or sizes you can upload. However, there may still be restrictions on resource-intensive apps, like gaming or video editing platforms, on shared hosting plans.
Unwanted ads
To recuperate the costs of giving away free hosting, free providers often place ads on users’ websites. Not only can this make websites look unprofessional, but users have little if any control over which ads are displayed. This raises the potential for websites to display the ads of their competitors and those that do not align with company values.
Furthermore, the third-party software required to run ads can contain vulnerabilities that enable cybercriminals to access websites, potentially taking them offline, infecting them with malware or stealing data.
Premium web hosts never display ads on their customers’ websites.
Unexpected fees
Paid-for hosting plans are designed to provide users with everything they need to run their websites. Aside from hosting, shared hosting plans can include free SSL certificates, free daily backups, unlimited databases, top-of-the-range control panels (e.g. cPanel) and the ability to host multiple websites.
While these can come as standard with a premium provider, with free hosting, they incur additional fees. Ironically, these ‘extras’ can be significantly more expensive than a paid-for hosting plan.
Service guarantees
Premium hosting comes with uptime guarantees of 99.9%. This means websites will be online for 99.9% of the time (rebooting servers after operating system updates means 100% isn’t achievable). Free hosting rarely provides such uptime assurances, so there are no guarantees that websites will always be online, and no recompense should downtime occur.
Additionally, paid hosting does not limit monthly bandwidth usage – the gigabytes of data a website sends and receives. This is not the case with free hosting plans, which means that if bandwidth limits are reached, the site will go offline until the start of the next month.
Stay online – read: 6 Ways to Prevent Website Downtime
24/7 customer support
Paid-for hosting comes with 24/7 technical support. This means that if there is an issue of any kind, a human expert is always on hand to help resolve it quickly. While this service is free for website owners to use, it is costly for hosts to implement. For this reason, support is very limited on free hosting. Instead of speaking to an experienced technician, users are reliant on slow email responses, self-help pages and community forums where solutions are not guaranteed.
Conclusion
While free web hosting may seem like a cost-effective solution, it can often lead to significant issues. The risks include weak security, poor performance and reliability, inadequate support and hidden costs. The negative impact these can have on websites makes professional hosting, which can cost from less than £1 a week, a far better long-term investment.
Don’t let poor hosting decisions put your website at risk. Webhosting UK’s secure, high-performance hosting comes with 24/7 expert support, cPanel, free backups, multi-site hosting and a range of other benefits and features. For more information, take a look at our Shared Hosting Plans.
