Free or Paifd web hosting
Probably Your first qustion about web hosting will be whether to choose free or paid hosting service... I'd choose the paid hosting .. let me explain why...
Free web hosting:
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Its for free. You dont need to pay anything, unless you want to buy a domain name. -
Your URL will be something like yourname.thehostname.com at the best. As I you see, the advantage is that you dont need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can loose some or all your traffic. -
The free host will probably include ads to your pages - 1 or 2 banners or more, sometimes popup windows... forget about respect of your visitors!.
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Free hosts offer no guarantee about uptime and not offer any type of tech. support, if you have a problem then do it yourself or look elsewhere.
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Free hosts usually allow much lower traffic and disk space than paid hosts and most of them don't offer futures like PHP and MySQL.
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A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time.
If your free host offers hosting wihtout ads now, dont be surprised when banner or popup appears on your site in the future.
it happens that free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choises - pay them or lose your website. -
Overall, free host is good to start with and test your skills, but as paid web hosting become really cheap then I think there is no need to use free hosts.
Paid web hosting:
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Now you can use your domain www.myname.com. If you decide to change the web hosting provider in the future, you easily transfer the domain to the new provider and lose no traffic.
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All paid hosts offer tech. support via email or live chat and some of them provide toll-free phone support.
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You can expect better uptime than on free host. usually paid hosts offer uptime guarantee.
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Paid hosts usually offer ubgradable disk space and bandwith. features like CGI, PHP and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not programmer you can download plenty of free PHP scripts from the web, you can download and install web logs, photo galleries, contact forms and more.
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Paid hosting cost money!