This is a brief definition of free web hosting service offered by some web hosting providers.

A quick search on google for the term "Free Web Hosting" returns over 96.2 million results., at the time of writing this article Of course, not all the sites returned actually offers web hosting service, but it just goes to show how popular is the scheme. So what is free web hosting? what is available and what's not? are there any catches?

Free web hosting is a service offered by some companies across the web to those looking to host a typical small web site or blog for no cost. As it's free, it attracts many individuals who are not looking to pay to make their content available on the web. There are many downsides to free webhosting, such as not having your own http://www.mydomain.com/, ads on your pages from companies which you may not agree with, speed of loading pages and more.

What's available on a free web hosting account and what's not?

Typically, the free web hosting provider allows for a small hosting space where content can be placed to be available on the web. The address provided is usually a child domain or sub domain of the web hosting provider domain name, such as yoursite.hostingprovider.com or www.hostingprovider.com/~yoursite.

Free web hosting provider usually doesn't allow an email account to be associated with the account and if they do, the number of emails offered will be usually limited to 1. There is also bandwidth and hosting space restrictions, which mean you can only have a limited number of content and if your online venture grows and your site starts to generate many visitors, your site may be suspended for exceeding the specified bandwidth or the number of times your content has been be downloaded and viewed.

There are also limitations on web applications and scripting languages you can run such as PHP and ASP. Almost all free web hosting providers I've seen doesn't allow these to run or even be hosted on the assigned server space. Instead, free web hosts allows for simple HTML with images to be hosted or have a built-in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software that allows you to type or copy and paste content for publishing.

Free web hosting catches

One would wonder why a web hosting provider will spare the time, money, bandwidth, server space and various other resources to cater for a FREE web hosting account?

As with everything in life, nothing is free, and what's free usually have a hidden cost or a catch. With this in mind, following are a few you might expect to see:

For starters, instant activation is not possible with almost all free web hosts. This is because free web hosting accounts can be exploited for malicious purpose. Most web hosting providers run advertisements on free hosting accounts to make a return on what's being offered for free. Some ads can be explicit or for stuff you may not want visitors to see in your account, or it may appear as you have allowed for them. The worst ones are pop-ups or very large flashing banners that destruct visitors to your content. As it's a free account, most web host will have a very strict and sometimes unfair terms in their fine print to shut your account without prior notice or good cause, and it's not a lot you can do about it.

Conclusion

Free web hosting could be a temporary why of publishing content online or experimenting with the web without having to pay for a supported hosting solutions. However, this is not a good option in the long run in my opinion for individuals or companies looking to publish a lot of content without restrictions and draw backs of free web hosting. Shared web hosting solutions is good and cheaper alternative.

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Since I will be blogging about web hosting servers and service basics, tips and tricks, hosting guide and more, I though I will kick off with a basic definition of web hosting.

In order to better grasp the concept of web hosting, it's important to get a little history behind it. Don't worry, I won't bore you with a lot of details as I will keep things short and skip to the basics quickly.

When more than one computer became inter-connected and needed to serve files containing various information, the web is born. Web hosting started when individuals and organisations needed a server to host files that can be served to the web. A server is a computer running a system capable of serving files over the web to other computers. Serving files requires the use of a protocol. Just like we need a common language to talk to each other, computers need a protocol to be able to exchange information. There are many Internet protocols available for this purpose. The most popular is HTTP.

The server I mentioned, has the advantage of being well connected to the Internet and capable of running an OS and software to "serve" files, such as HTML, images, PDFs...etc to computers requesting those files using a browser, such as Internet Explorer, FireFox or Chrome. Now, why wouldn't people or companies host those files themselves? keeping in mind that computers are very cheap nowadays and many Operating Systems flavours capable of running a hosting service are free?

Running a web server is more than just installing an Operating System such Linux or Windows on a server. Beside requiring backbone connection to the Internet, which means being well connected and able to serve files on high bandwidth, they need to be maintained on many aspects; pacthes, security updates, backup to name back a few. This means that there was a need to an organisation or individuals where this service can be assigned to while companies can focus on their core business.

Since than, many companies have appeared around the world offering web hosting services. Now, web hosting service is a pretty broad name. In other words, there are many types of web hosting services that is on offer. It starts from free web hosting, shared hosting, virtual private hosting, e-commerce hosting and dedicated hosting. I'll go into more details on each hosting type on a different post, since details on these types area little beyond the scope of web hosting definition and requires a dedicated post.

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