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Free Hosting Space Providers
Plentiful free web space (sometimes with site design tools) are available you will be spoiled for choice. But not all are suitable for your business for a variety of reasons I will shortly make clear. So, even though it's free you must spend time searching for one or more that are suitable for your business today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future.
Tips
* Choose carefully and view free hosting as a means to help you start a business on a shoestring and learn the ropes of marketing online before branching out into having a private web site with a professional web hosting service. Note that most ISPs also offer free space, sometimes perfect for business needs, often not. Spend time looking for business sites they already host before trusting your business to them.
* Free web space is excellent for storing reports, ebooks and such and for linking to your home page which carries an exclusive domain name. Literally thousands of free hosting sites exist meaning you could upload your domain name site onto a paid-for hosting site (small amounts of space cost as little as £5 a month) and thereafter adding page after page of new products and services, banner and joint venture deals, etc., onto free web space.
* Virtually all free space providers include their own advertisements as the 'price' for hosting your site. It's vital to choose your free space provider carefully and avoid those using loud banners, noisy music, flashing pop up boxes and huge banners, which are great for attracting business for them but can be counter-productive to your interests.
* At best, obtrusive host advertising diverts focus from your site, at worst it looks amateurish and reduces confidence in you as a business owner.
* Many free web space providers offer web design facilities, often via templates which site owners customise to their own requirements. Spend time shopping around for the easiest, best, most professional-looking templates.
* Virtually all offer some means of uploading sites created other than from their own templates. Some don't, so visit as many sites as possible before choosing one or more for your business pages.
* Some free web space providers do not accept commercial sites. Check before assuming and certainly before designing a site using one of their ready-uploaded pages or one created elsewhere.
* Some sites bar certain types of business, such as meat manufacture (I know a vegetarian hosting free sites), pornography (I would avoid any host that welcomes such sites), adult products and services, illegal sites (again, avoid those who welcome all and sundry), and so on.
* Virtually all free space providers include a list of rules for potential site owners to read and agree to before uploading. Check these thoroughly and be sure you understand the rules, and are prepared to abide by them. Otherwise you run the risk of taking days to customise a web page on your chosen site only to find it missing ten minutes after it's uploaded when the host makes a spot check.
* Avoid free hosting companies with names that might create a poor or amateurish impression of your business. I may be old-fashioned but silly or even rude names create nothing but a very poor impression of the company for me. The same goes, in my opinion, for sites which boast the fact they are free to advertisers - will people really buy a book showing how to become a millionaire which I upload to freesitesforskinties.com? I don't think so. I won't go into details here for fear of attracting a law suit, but I think these hopefully fictitious hosting companies will prove my point:
freesitesforskinties.com
PauperCity.com
SmallTimeTrader.com
Icon.com (I Con??)
OnlyIdiotsPay.com
SmutCity.com
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