Free Hosts for Your First Site

So now that you have decided on a topic for your first site, we need to get it published. There are any number of paid hosting sites that you could use, but we are trying to get our first site up for free. Once we start making some money, then we can go ahead and get a paid provider. If you'd like to go ahead and set up with a paid service, BlueHost and HostGator both seem to get consistently good reviews. I can't say which is better, as I've never used either, but they both seem to be good, reliable providers, and both are rated very high for their support of Drupal, which is an open source content management system that I intend to use for my websites. If you've never tried Drupal, I'm in the process of learning to use it, and I've got to say that it makes creating a high-quality website, complete with forums and ecommerce setups, extremely easy, even if you have no knowledge of HTML or CSS. I'll get into learning Drupal in future posts, but if you'd like to work ahead a little, the book I'm reading now is Beginning Drupal 7. If you can follow simple instructions, you can make a very profesional site by following along with this book. In fact, I am so impressed with Drupal that I already got a copy of Pro Drupal 7 Development so I can go straight into it when I finish the first book. But for now, let's focus on finding a free host.

I have used two free hosts in the past. The site you are reading now is hosted by Blogger. If you need to get a simple site up and running fast, you can't go wrong with Blogger. You give up a lot of control in site design, but the templates and ability to customize should be sufficient to give your site a unique look and feel. Blogger also does not place ads on your site, and it gives you the ability to place your own adds on your pages. Plus, the AdSense and Amazon gadgets make setting your blog up to make money, extremely easy. Blogger also allows you to use a subdomain for free, or to link the site to a domain that you have registered.  Since my goal is to not spend any money until the site is making money, I went with the free subdomain. Wordpress.com is another very popular free blogging platform, however, sites hosted on Wordpress.com are not permitted to post ads, and therefore, Wordpress is not useful for our purposes. Wordpress.com should not be confused with Wordpress.org, which provides the Wordpress blogging platform for use on your own hosted site, where you can use whatever ads and affiliate links that you would like.

Blogs are great for getting your site going quickly, without having to worry about any of the programming or design. If you know how to design and program your own sites, there are some options available for you as well. The only free provider that I have any experience with is 110MB.com. I created a site on 110mb several years ago and I have not had any problem with them as a host. The site that I created (you can see it here) has not been kept up to date, and I have never monitored the up-time, but every time I've gone to the site, it has been up and running. If you're hosting a huge ecommerce site with thousands of visitors every day, then the up time may be an issue (although a site that big would be over the available space and bandwidth allowed for free accounts anyway), but for the small information sites that we are starting with, I don't think it will be that big of a deal. The only downside of 110mb is that their free accounts don't allow you to use some of the better features that the paid service provides, most importantly, Drupal. The good thing is, that you can start with the free account and then upgrade to their paid service later if you are happy with them as a host. Check their site for a comparison of their Free VS. Premium services. Another thing that I like about 110mb is that they provide you with a free subdomain, and the .110mb.com subdomain is fairly unobtrusive compared to some other free site providers. If you're going to be using a free subdomain, I believe that the shorter and/or less obtrusive it is the better off you will be. I've seen some arguments that subdomains may hurt your site in terms of SEO. I can't say if that is true or not, but I will assume that it is. That just means that we will need to rely less on search engine rankings for our traffic and find other ways to drive readers to our sites. I'm starting to get a little off track here, so we will discuss SEO and driving traffic at another time.

Back to free web hosts. As I said, 110MB is the only free provider that I have used myself, so it's the only one that I can recommend based on personal experience. However, while doing research for this post, I came across several other sites that have caught my attention. When searching for a free host, I have two basic requirements: 1) The host cannot force its own ads on your site, and 2) The host must allow you to post your own ads and affiliate links on your site. A Google search for free website hosts gives millions of hits. Most of the free web hosts that I found share a few similar characteristics. They all give you a fairly small space and low bandwidth for your site. This is not necessarily that bad for our purposes, we only need a little space to get a small site up and running. Second, most of the free providers will allow you to use a free subdomain. As I said earlier, the shorter and less obtrusive, the better when using a subdomain. If you don't want a subdomain, and your willing to go ahead and shell out about $10, you can register your own domain and link it to your free host. The third thing I found about all of the free web hosts is that they all have a paid service that you can upgrade to. This is a benefit for our purposes. If you find a free host that you like, once your site starts to bring in some money, you can easily upgrade to the paid service without having to transfer all your files to a new host. Finally, the downfall of most free hosts is that they limit the features available on a free account. This means that on most free hosts, you will only be able to utilize basic HTML and CSS. The lack of PHP and MySQL on most of these sites, means that you won't be able to use CMSs like Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.

While scouring the forums for information on free hosts, Weebly caught my attention. Of all the free web hosts that I found Weebly will be the first one that I try, once I'm ready to get another site up. I haven't signed up yet, so I can't say whether it's as good as it looks or not, but the feature list seems to be promising. The site promises an easy drag-and-drop website creator, which I am anxious to try and it says that they provide powerful blogging features, which leads me to believe they support MySQL and PHP. Whether or not they allow you to install your own scripts is yet to be seen, but I am still hopeful. While Weebly is the host that I will probably try first, I did find several others that looked fairly promising. These include Doteasy.com, Microsoft Office Live, and 000WebHost. All of these sites seem to have potential as starter sites, and I plan on trying them all as I get some sites running. As is to be expected, all of these hosts have both positive and negative comments in the forums, but these four hosts seem to lean more to the positive side. You will have to experiment for yourself to find the free host that is right for you, but these will give you a place to start. If you know of any other free hosts, or if you have personal experience with any of the hosts that I've listed, please share your experiences in the comments. Next time I will give some details on my experiences signing up for several affiliate programs. Thanks for reading!

Resources from this Post:


Free Web Hosts:
Blogger
110MB
Weebly
Doteasy.com
Microsoft Office Live
000WebHost

Paid Web Hosts:
BlueHost
HostGator

Useful Websites:
Drupal.org

Recommended Books: