Thinking about starting your own website? The good news is that free web hosting is available at many sites. There are many things to consider before you make this decision and investing your time and energy in building your site.
Why do you want a website? Is it for connecting with your friends, and making new friends? Social networking is a big industry these days, with many sites such as Facebook and MySpace. You can easily invite and connect with your people.
For the photo buff you will want to consider a photo friendly site. While all the free web space hosts give you the ability to load your photos, web hosts such as flicker specialize in this area.
Most of the free web space hosts have additional features to enhance and customize your website, such as templates for the appearance. Add on features include features like linking, photo upload, and comment sections where others can remark on your postings.
There is yet another level to free web hosting that many of these free sites do not allow, and that is the display of ads. Sure, you can talk about something you offer, and provide links to other sites, but many have it in their sign up that commercial sites are not allowed. Some do allow Google Adsense, such as the Blog-spot site now owned by Google.
One key part of having a website is the identity, and the domain name is a big part of that. When you use a free web space host your site location, the address used to find you on the web, will be a combination of your unique name and the host site. One example is a site hosted on blog-spot, which has their own name integrated with the hosts name.
If you are dead set on having your own domain name, you will need to arrange for a hosting service, which steps you out of the free hosting level into paid hosting. The great thing about paid hosting is that you can host multiple sites and will have greater latitude in what features you can have for your site. Your own site can be set up with basic HTML pages, or use a content management system, which we will discuss in our next article.
One thing for sure, if you find that your free web space is not going to give you all the features you would like, you can always change to another site. You’re not out any money, just your time. You can keep your free site up and running and link to your new site.
The best thing about free web hosting is that your photos and ideas are safe in the event you have a computer crash or other data catastrophe. While not meant to be a data storage space, you can always retrieve your photos from your online space.
There is no doubt about it, free web space hosting is the way to go for that starter website. Either way, your voice will be heard through your words and picture, or literally though MP3 files on your site.
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