Easy Ideas on Getting Your Free Website Right Away
It’s very easy nowadays to get a free website. Whether you want to start a small online business or just want to share your opinions with the rest of the world, you can get a website of your own with just a few clicks of the mouse. Before getting that site, however, you first need to answer the question, what do you want to do with your website?
If you just plan to share stuff with others online, you should probably go with a blog. A blog allows you to post articles, pictures, videos as well as links to other web sites, and it requires little technical knowledge. Visitors are also allowed to write and upload comments about what you’ve posted, and you can manage them, editing certain comments and deleting others you find inappropriate.
If you would like to establish a reputation for expertise on a particular subject so you can build a career as a freelance consultant, a blog is the ideal solution. A hosted blog service allows you to set up a blog in a matter of minutes. You can easily design your blog using the site’s pre-designed templates and write and post entries using its text editors. An alternative is to use get free articles from content generating sources other than yourself.
If you would like to restrict access to your blog to family and friends, you can create your blog using an online diary service or a tumblelog. These blogs are essentially online journals or scrapbooks where you can post photos, videos, text entries and links to other sites. They can also be used to social network through an online community.
If you’re creating a site for an online business, however, you will need to use a free web hosting service to create your site. A web site set up on a free web host allows you to include e-commerce features such as multiple e-mail accounts, a shopping cart and online payment solutions.
However, there are many downsides to using a free web host. For example, many hosts will offset hosting costs by placing their own advertising on your free site. Your URL will look something like this mybusinessname.webhost.com, which many clients might interpret as unprofessional. And the amount of bandwidth you are allocated is limited, which means that if you start to get a lot of visitors, many of them may not be able to access your site once you have exceeded your allocation. If these limitations don’t bother you, go ahead and set up your site on a free web host. Once your online venture starts to become a success, you can easily upgrade to a paid web host provider.
Before selecting the web host to get your free web site, here are some criteria you should consider.
One, what is the amount of web space the host will give you? If you intend to put a lot of pictures, video clips and sound files, the allocation may not be enough for your needs. You should also consider if the web space allocation will give your site room to grow in the future.
Second, once you’ve gained some technical expertise and want to upload web pages that you’ve designed yourself to your site, does the web host allow FTP access?
Three, what is the maximum file size and what are the kinds of files the web host allows you to upload to your free web site?
Fourth, how fast or reliable is the web host? If your site frequently down or has slow access, then you will lose visitors and business since they will look for another site.
Fifth, how much bandwidth does the free web host allocate to you? For a starter e-commerce site, an allocation of 1 to 3 GB should be sufficient.
There’s little difficulty in getting a free website; the challenge lies in creating and maintaining an interesting one that will make people want to visit it over and over again.