Everyone like to take advantage of freebies and free web hosts could be a great option for you if you own a small informational website, want to start a personal blog or need somewhere to upload some pictures and files so that you can share them with friends. WordPress and Blogger are perhaps the two most popular free hosting providers. Unfortunately, free web hosts do have some limitations, however, this article contains some tips and ideas that could help you to get around some of those limitations.

Disk space Limitations

Most free web hosts will provide you with a very small amount of webspace. While html and php files are usually less than 5MB each, picture, music and video files can be very large. Therefore, you should upload your website’s pictures to Picasa or Flickr and your website’s videos to YouTube instead of uploading this media to the free web host’s servers. You can then place embedded links to your media on your website and avoid maxing out a free web host’s web space allowance.

Bandwidth Limitations

There isn’t really any way to creatively get around a free web host’s bandwidth limit. The monthly bandwidth limit is the total amount of data that can be downloaded (or uploaded) from your web space in any given calendar month. Every time an Internet user visits your website, data is being downloaded from your web space. If you surpass a free web host’s monthly bandwidth limit, your website will usually be taken offline until the next month begins and the limit is reset. While you website’s home page, probably index.htm, could be only 3MB in size, bored, malicious internet users could decide to continually refresh your home page in their web browsers and put your website offline fairly quickly since the average monthly bandwidth limit with free web hosts is less than 5GB.

Adverts

Free web hosts usually make their money by placing third-party adverts your website. Unfortunately, the adverts that are placed on your website by free web hosts can often be very intrusive, so you should encourage your website’s visitors to use Adblock Plus, a browser extension that blocks most Internet adverts. Savvy Internet users will probably already be using this extension, or a similar extension, so they will not see the adverts anyway.

Professionalism

Obviously, www.mywebsite.freewebhosting.com, for example, does not make your website look very professional. However, you can buy a cheap custom domain name from a third party and redirect it to your free web hosting space. When you use a custom domain name in this way, your website’s visitors will never see freewebhosting.com.

As you can see, there are a few ways in which you can bypass some of the major disadvantages of free web hosts. Eventually, however, you will probably have to transfer your website paid host. Transferring a website is relatively easy, but if you are confident that your website is going to become popular in the future, you might want to consider using a paid web host from day one.