Free hosting or paid

Many customers migrate to adeyhost after talking to us, and many ask "Why should I pay for web site hosting when I get free hosting with my ISP's dial-up account?" and its a good question to ask.

Free hosting from your ISP may well be a very good solution for many people but for many a move to paid for hosting is inevitable.

Paid for hosting generally offers a wider range of facilities such as access to a cgi-bin for running your own scripts, php, mySQL databases, web statistics and the ability to support your own domain name.

Your own domain name, such as adeyhost.co.uk, is an important toll for companies wishing to portray a professional image, and for this reason alone we recommend a paid for web site hosting solution.

Pop-up banners are a feature we are asked about in many pre-sales enquiries, and no we don not use them! Pop-up banners are the irritating screens that appear when you go to a web page hosted on may free, or 'cheap' web hosting solutions. They are intended to promote the hosting provider but do so in a way that annoys many visitors and the last this a business needs is its web site annoying potential customers. We recommend not using any Free web site hosting that has pop-up banners for your business.

Your ISP's free space will almost certainly have support for Form Mail, the ability for you to have the contents of a web page form emailed to you, and they will probably have a counter script as well. Want to run an on-line store? Need to have protected 'members only' areas?, these and many more tasks are not possible with the free option and your only solution is to look for professionally hosted web space.

Once you are up an running with your web site you will soon find out that a counter is little more than a gimmick, what you really need is web statistics. Web Stats show visits to your web site, which pages were seen, where the visitors were referred from, and even a breakdown of the day showing your busiest hours!
So why are these statistics important? Well for example one of our clients selling electronic equipment found out that the web page for one item was being visited more often than any others. Strangely this was a piece of equipment that out client had written off and was making no attempt to promote. The web stats caused them to re-think and have an advertising campaign for the product. Now its nearly their best seller!

Back to the question, Free web site hosting or paid? If you are in business there is only one sensible answer - get some professional, reliable, fast hosting.