Anything free is tempting, right? We will go for it without thinking and will regret later. The case is same when we have a plan to build a website for our business too. One of the most common mistakes people make when starting website for their business is choosing a free website or low cost (cost less than 5000 INR) website over a paid quality website.
You may be able to save a few bucks for free hosting but it will cost a lot in some other ways. In fact, it will hold your business back. Here, I tell you the reasons for why shouldn’t you use a free website or low cost website for your company and some consequences of using it.
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You don’t own a decisive part of your business; your website
You lack power and ownership on your company website as you don’t have control on free websites. Think of a situation where you don’t own the vital segment and the decisive part of your business; your website. At any time, your free-dom can be taken away or removed when the free website company can decide to stop their business and go.
With a free or cheap website, your business will look very unprofessional
With a free website or low cost website your business is never going to be professional. In the internet market, if your web looks unprofessional means that the face of your company looks cheap. That is going to badly affect your business. With free website addresses you can’t build your personal brand. Customers would hesitate to take your web seriously when you don’t have even a proper domain name and they may doubt your credibility.
With free websites, you can’t optimize for SEO
This is the worst part when you go for a free platform. Free hosts don’t provide opportunities for search engine optimization. In fact, they may harm your search engine performance. Search engines give less priority to free domains and will not send as much traffic to your website due to the lack of trust and credibility. Free websites load at a very low speed as hundreds of webs share the same server. Slow websites are bad for SEO.
You can’t get customer support for free websites
How irritating is the situation where you don’t get any assistance when you badly want it. Going for a free website or low cost website may create the same situation. You can’t have a personal customer support with free web hosting platforms as you do with some premium ones. Nowadays every company has advanced customer service facilities from live chat to direct meetings.
Holding a free website is not secure at all
Free websites are vulnerable to hacking due to lack of security. Once your site is hacked it would be difficult to recover when these free hosting companies give you very limited access to your own files and data. They don’t even back up your data. Obviously you don’t matter to them.
Your free website can be shut down anytime
Free website hosting companies has the right to shut down your free website anytime they want without any reason as their terms and conditions clearly state this. Once they shut down you may lose your data forever as they don’t back up.
Free websites have limited space and bandwidth
Free website companies have hundreds of websites sharing the same hard discs and so provide you very limited space to store your data. Once you use the space allowed either you will be asked to pay for more space or stop working. The case with bandwidth is same.
Irrelevant ads will appear on your free website
These free service providers will insert irrelevant and unwanted (for you not for them) advertisements on your website and will make it look totally unprofessional. You will not have any control on it and your provider will make money. They may stick some ads on the top of your site and make it even ugly. Ah, better to not have one.
Resources are also limited in free websites
Free websites have a lot of limitations which might limit your business too. They don’t have much design options and so can’t have a design that you want. They offer only a limited number of pages as well. You will have to pay to add more pages. Free websites are also difficult to customize. They are usually limited to basics and if you want to upgrade you need to pay.
Finally, free will not be always free
Many of the free websites turn out to be free trials. And when the trial period is over you will be asked for the payment at a higher price than normal companies. They also make money in some other ways as well like charging for additional services, selling your email address, personal information or website address for other companies, and image hosting.
In short, it is not a wise decision to go for a free website or low cost website if you want to build one for your business. The wrong decisions might lead your business towards some wrong directions.