Budget Hosting vs Free Hosting

I've been playing with the idea of starting a blog for a long time now. I purchased a domain name a couple of months ago, I designed a Wordpress theme, I already have a few posts ready to go live but I haven't figured out where to host the site. I want to eventually get profit from the site but for now I'm trying to keep costs as low as possible. That's why I'm thinking on using free hosting or getting a budget one (something around $1~2 per month).

What would you choose? Would you go with free hosting? Would you rather get a budget? If so, which provider would you get?

Looking forward to reading your answers. Thanks!

 

Go with budget hosting if you have to. Free hosting has the issues that:

You don't know if your host can afford to keep running, and hence it's more likely to go broke and shut down.

You're not entitled to any support because you're not paying for it. Same with a good service in general. It's best to at least have some chance of getting help when you need it than none at all.

 

I have just 'saved' a client from free hosting. We were just in time to get his database/files, otherwise the free host was gone forever, so would have been 2 years of blog posts from his side. Budget hosting is the way to go. I mean my client is paying 12 bucks/year (1 dollar/month), not that big a deal if you come to think of it. And he's on my server, with excellent uptime and I'm not planning on pulling the plug on his site anytime soon

 

If i was you start with x10hosting as it is a good free starter host with pretty good memory, space etc, if you want payed then upgrade to x10premium or hostgator as there pretty cheap.

 

I have seen a few free hosting companies that also have a few budget hosting plans. Maybe it would be safe going with someone like that don't you think? I'm sure they must use the same servers for both free and paying users so there shouldn't be any risk.

You are right about support. I think the same and maybe just because of the support I should be go with budget hosting.

 

I wouldn't recommend a host that offers free as well as paid hosting. Why? Because they tend to be very, very uncompetitively priced, simply because they realise they can basically 'upsell' their existing free customers to their paid services down the line. Why offer a decent amount of space or bandwidth, or useful features when you can take advantage of people unwilling or unable to look around for a better deal?

 

On another forum someone told me something similar: that hosts that have both free and paid offers always force their free customers to update to a paid plan or get their accounts canceled.

 

It's not just that. Seriously, compare what many free hosts offer for paid plans and what standard paid hosts offer. The latter almost always offers far more, since the former is usually hoping people who get too 'big' for free hosting can be persuaded to upgrade to their paid plan (like you said) and isn't savvy enough to look around for a better deal.

It's especially noticeable with the likes of Tripod, Angelfire, Geocities (when it was around), etc and their paid plans, since they offered so little for people's money that I almost had to question the sanity of anyone who went with them.

If a company thinks they can get people to go with them because they're not seen as savvy enough to look around, they'll charge unreasonable prices and offer worse service.

 

I currently have two boards running, my old phpBB3 one being hosted, and one being free hosted using ProBoards. While the former (phpBB3) board is better in a lot of ways, because I can choose which forum software to use, if ads gets displayed or not, and so on to suit me better. The downside is, most people starting a new forum use "shared hosting", which in itself can bring problems. They update PHP and MySQL without you having any say in it, so if you don't keep the forum software up-to-date, or if you mod it so much over time that you cannot update it. Well.. one day years work will be down the drain (and don't think it can't happen). It just happened to you with vBulletin 4, you are now talking about moving that site to XenForo because it doesn't support PHP installed on server, and vBulletin have not made vB4 work with that version of PHP yet.

At least with my ProBoards site, I know it is their forum software - installed on their servers to work perfect all the time. So in that sense, I feel much more "secure" with that board not breaking on me one day, than I would with the phpBB forum I'm paying to host online. While there are many down-sides to using a free host, which I agree on. At least you have more confidence the board will run problem free. And when it comes to free forum hosting, there are a lot of crap services out their, don't put the better ones in the same mould as those others which are bad. Because some are not, such as ProBoards and why I picked them.

It isn't only about paying to rent a server giving you more options and freedom, than you get using a free hosted forum. It's also about considering which is the best of the two to keep your board running - without one day seeing it down with problems that need fixing, that you might not be able to fix. What if for example, you loved running that vB4 and vB wasn't planning to release a PHP update. You'd be stuffed now with having to convert to a different forum software like XenForo (you might not like). But lucky for you, that isn't the case.

Anyway, what's so different about a person using a good free hosted forum compared to millions of people using Facebook or Twitter for free?

 

Just that Facebook and Twiter are big name companies that are more likely to be running for years and not dissapearing from one day to another.

 

Budget hosting is better. What's a couple bucks a month? However, there are some good post to hosts if you're cheap like me. I'm planning on buying a VPS soon though.

 

Well finally I went with a VPS myself. I found a good deal at http://www.lowendbox.com I'll be paying $3.5 per month for a 1GB Ram, 60GB of diskspace and 1TB of bandwidth VPS.

 

$3.50 per month for that VPS? That is a bargain indeed, although I assume it comes with nothing installed and no cPanel etc?

As per the original post, for a few $ a month I would always go for paid hosting, you never know what you'll end up with free stuff.

 

It does not have anything installed and no cPanel indeed. I was looking for something that would cost me just a couple of dollars per month and then I saw that VPS offer so I decided to grab it. Installing Wordpress isn't really hard and that's basically all I'll need.

 

So what makes you think Cheap Hosting Budget services are going to be around for very long in such a competitive hosting market? At least pick one that's likely to stick around like NameCheap, or another of the big named companies. You said that to me in one comment, then in your next said you went with a relativity low budget unknown web host. I fail to see the logic in that one, and bet ProBoards will still be around long after your new host closes shop?

 

Yes I went to a complete unknown web host but I don't see where's the problem with what I told you before. On the post you are referring to I was addressing a specific question you made and it was:

I said that Facebook and Twitter wouldn't go away from one day to another. I'm not saying that the company I went with is going to give me that service forever and I'm aware they can easily be gone any of these days, it's just that I feel that I have better chances of getting support if I pay that if I don't.

 

Well yes, Facebook and Twitter are bigger than any free web host (even paid hosts), and are likely to be around a lot longer because of it. But it's all "IF's and MAYBE's". Nobody knows what's around the corner, I might drop dead tomorrow and it won't matter who my forum is hosted with.

So use whatever suits you best I say...

 

But as long as the owner of your host doesn't drop dead you can be sure your forum will still be up and running

My question was what was better free or budget hosting and most answers said that budget was better and I'm convinced of the same myself. We I have asked wich one was better, free or paid. The answer would be that the paying option is better. Now there will be paid services that are far better than others. Facebook and Twitter I'm sure both have a infraestrucutre that will keep their service running even if some of their nodes fail. I'm pretty sure premium hosting services also have something like that.

I, with my budget VPS, am sure that if there's a trouble with my hosting my server is going to dissapear even if I'm paying for it. But that's a risk I'm willing to take because I don't have any real business running there yet.

 

Any hosting company can go down under. I mean here in the UK under the current recession there has been so many big brand high streets stores closed down that you thought would be making killer profit but actuall were running at a huge loss.

Then you've got privacy and dcma issues... If one host is letting their users host pirated stuff and the government gets involved then the whole centre could get shut down.

However, the chances of this happening with the company your with is going to very very slim. So it's not worth worrying about! Just go for it and best of luck matey.

 

Does anyone know any good hosts which are like $3/month, i found deltawebhosting but it seems too good to be true sadly but i may just risk it and see.