Typical advantages
In general, a free web hosting service has following advantages:
Does not cost anything to obtain and maintain service.
No credit card needed to get free hosting service.
A good place to start for people who are new to web designing and HTML.
Also a good alternative for people who do not feel they are ready for a paid web hosting service yet for any reason.
A typical free host provides a lot of tutorials and site building tools, enabling people to build their sites very easily without any technical knowledge.
Depending on the type of service, a new website can be published online almost instantly.
A lot of free hosting providers have their own online user community, where a new member can interact with other members who share similar interest.
New members can also get technical help and advice from other members of that community.
Typical disadvantages
Generally, a free hosting service has some significant limitations compared to a paid hosting service. Some of the common disadvantages are discussed below:
Most free web hosting providers will place forced advertisements (banner and pop-ups) on users websites.
The amount of web space provided by a free host is usually very low.
The monthly quota of bandwidth (data transfer rate) is usually very low.
Most free hosting providers put restrictions on file types. People are not allowed to use certain types of files on their site.
Also there are restrictions on the actual size of an individual file.
Due to different restrictions and the features available to someone are so limited that it is very hard to create a site with advanced functionality.
Most free hosting providers do not offer any direct customer support for their free hosting services.
A Website from a free web host tend to receive lower ranking from major search engines, which results in low visibility of the website in different search engine results.
People often find it hard to generate revenue from their free hosting site by serving advertisements from different advertising networks because most major ad networks usually do not allow free websites to participate in their ad campaigns.
Free web hosts usually do not provide any site uptime guarantee to their users. As a result the downtime experienced by a free hosting account is sometimes longer than paid hosting accounts.
Free hosting may have the following limitations
Free hosting may have the following limitations:
* Limitation on the size of each hosted file
* Very small bandwidth per month compared to paid hosting
* Prevents hotlinking of files
* Do not allow certain file types (for example MP3, MPEG, ZIP etc.)
* Compulsory placement of the Webhosts' Banner or Popup ads into all web pages
* Do not provide any uptime guarantee
Some free host may provide these extra features:
* A web based control panel
* File transfer via FTP
* Scripting languages: PHP, ASP, Perl etc.
* Relational databases such as MySQL
* Scheduled processes, known as cronjobs
* Free email accounts for the domain or subdomain hosted
* Other features such as guestbooks (e.g. Bravenet)
Methods of giving out Webhosting
Methods of giving out Webhosting
A few methods of giving out Free Webhosting to people by Webhosts
Instant Activation
Hosts with Instant Activation usually give very little storage space and bandwidth allowance, and have lots of limitations. The webhosts usually either require the users' web pages to display their banner ads, textlink ads, or popups; or else the users' files to be uploaded through a web-based file manager that display ads to the user uploading files. Hosts with Instant Activation are often abused by spammers, which upload pages to these hosts to use for Link spamming. Link spamming can cause slow servers and lots of downtime, but if managed correctly can create a wonderful service.
Post for Hosting
Some free hosts require posting in a forum. Forum-based free hosting requires users to either reach a certain amount of posts before getting a free hosting account, or be an active contributor in the forum. Forum-based free hosting often work on a system of points where posts give points to a user and can be used as credits toward getting a hosting account or more resources. Typically, the forum where users have to post contain excessive advertising. Posting for hosting can cause a slower server because the server has to manage the several hundred people on the hosts forum.
Forum Applications
This method is popular, as the hosts can decide which applications to deny and allow. This is common when a popular forum has free hosting as an add-on service, rather than the other way around. Forum applications can take a day or two to get accepted or denied, and are often one of the more popular solutions to free hosting.
File hosting on Webhosts
Most free web hosts discourage using their services for file or image hosting only, with no web page, since advertising is displayed on the web page. Because of this, hotlinking is usually disallowed on free hosts. Some free webhosts will also disallow files over a certain size (for example, 5 MB). However, there are free file hosting services which allow large files as well as hotlinking.
editor:
http://blogsarena.com
I am also an editor to Open-site.org project if you want to read more about free web hosting select free web hosting category in open-site.org project