Why You Don’t Need to Pay for Hosting Anymore
Huh? Free Hosting?
Where?! Hey! Wait, is this a scam?
No. But I see that you’re familiar with darker side internet marketing, however don’t get overly excited. Having said that though, I strongly suggest that you not jump at the first free hosting offer that comes spamming into your inbox, because it probably is a scam.
The fact is there is lots of “free hosting” but it is not always called “hosting”. It goes by other names.
Its started from the edges with services that are sometimes included with hosting, like email. Now days free email can be had from Google with Gmail, Yahoo, hotmail, etc. Then along came Google Analytics. Back when Google Analytics was known as Urchin Statistics it was a pricey add-on, or sometimes a nice premium feature offered by the larger hosting companies.
Then there are the photo sharing sites: Flickr, Snapfish, Picasa, shutterfly, etc.
Next comes the blogs. It’s hard to connect to the internet without tripping over a free blog offer. Blogger, Wordpress (the blog service not just the software), livejournal and dozens of other services. Then there is Myspace, the personal networking site for the young at heart that gives you your own home page.
More recently Google has been offering “Apps for your Domain”, which include Gmail, a small brochure site for which Google incorporates a simple web-based site builder, Web mail (Gmail) and intranet applications like web spreadsheet, word processing and file storage. The kicker though, is that your web pages show up on your own domain name not a google subdomain.
But there are other applications besides blogs or CMS. More free hosting components like Google Checkout — a complete web shopping cart — and video hosting in the form of YouTube to mention just two, have been making waves. I have stumbled upon dozens of other free video hosting sites in the last year.
So if you want to publish this type of content, you begin to ask yourself, “I would want to pay for web hosting because…?” Because indeed.
One answer to that question would be because you want to run a specific web application or web software. To do that you have to shell out some jack. Not a huge amount. But you have to pick the right web hosting for what you want to do.
So how do you pick the right hosting service? That sounds suspiciously like a segue doesn’t
Picking a hosting company is a subject for another article.
Happy trails.
