Free Web Hosting Services

Free web hosting services are the most basic form of web hosting services available, which defray the cost of hosting by putting up advertisements on the web pages. A number of such free hosting services can be found on the internet.

Free web hosting usually comes with limited services and features. Space available for content is also limited by ads that appear at the top and bottom of the web page, because of which it may also happen that all your content may not fit onto the same page. However, since it is free, it is the best bet for beginners who wish to have a no frills small website expecting little traffic.

A free website domain is usually a subdomain of the parent site. So, if your website is to be named ‘gregarious’, the website name will read www.gregarious.hostname.com, and not www.gregarious.com.

For a novice, this kind of service is usually sufficient. However, if you are not a novice, then you will face a number of constraints in using free domains for launching websites.

For instance, free sites usually do not support any type of data management tools for uploading data structures on the free web host server, which makes the website functionality limited. Databases are mostly required for online retrieval of data or information. Moreover, such services usually do not support MySQL also, which allows you to make queries from the databases.

Free website hosting services do not also support multiple email accounts. Most of them provide a single email account which is web-based.

In addition, there is usually no support for Flash Programming, DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) or PHP.

So essentially, free webhosting services are for novices who have little or no idea about website creation, and want to create a simple site without too much of functionality.