Other common problems with free web space can seriously hinder your rankings in search engines.

In particular a lot of free web space sites place your own webpage into a frame and then generate a page around it containing extra or repeated information.  This can prevent some people and search engine robots from seeing your actual webpage. Even worse are some providers who do not allow search engines to access your real web-pages without a username and password !! Repeated information may be treated as spam by the search engines and so should be avoided.

Probably the worst instances of using free web site hosting are:

1) A free web page advertising a computer show - although this appeared fine within Microsoft's Internet Explorer and some other internet browsers, in the popular Opera browser, it can cause problems, with the advertising frame flashing repeatedly over the left hand side of the actual page, or advertising blocking some of the sites logo and navigation links.

2) Another well known free web-hosting provider has also been utilised to host someone's adult website, which downloads a piece of spyware onto your computer without warning you.  As a result, when you find any sites hosted with this provider through the Google search engine, a warning comes up to state that the website is not safe and should not be visited unless you are certain of the authenticity and willing to take the risk that it may harm your computer.

In general, the addition of any advertising to your website by the hosting company is unattractive and you have no control over what advertising is displayed. If you adopt the right strategy, you can add advertising to your website which will be of specific interest to your visitors and generate an additional stream of income for yourself.  You can also use a similar approach to promote your own website through advertising.

Finally, the fact that most free web site hosting prevents access to the root directory, prevents you from giving any instructions to robots over which parts of your website they should index.  This can prevent you from adopting a proper search engine optimisation strategy.

With unreliable access, low bandwidth and slow servers, free web space is only really useful for small personal sites and certainly not for commercial websites.

What If I Need to Offer Large Downloads?

If you offer your users various downloads (for example, software, music or video), then you need to carefully consider how much bandwidth you need to provide.  Hosting accounts offering 250GB of space may seem sufficient, but if your files are typically 12-15MB (or even 100MB+ for videos), it is easy to see how, with a few thousand visitors per month, your bandwidth can soon be used up.  Hosting companies do not normally prevent people downloading or accessing your website once the bandwidth limit is reached, but you may be charged additional fees to cover the excess.

You may wish to investigate the use of Streamload's MediaMax which provides unlimited file storage for MP3, Divx, Anime, Movies, Images, and Music.  They also add the ability to charge your customers for downloads, make them searchable, mark them as Adult Only and even include them in emails.  Charges are based on the download width and amount of storage, although for Home and Small Business users, charges are a lot less.

How do I use a Database with my Site?

The most usual form of using a database (for example a stock and prices database for a shop-front) is a SQL database. 

SQL (Simplified Query Language) has become an industry standard means of formulating queries to retrieve data from a database whether it is stored on your own computer, or on a server.  The database itself can be generated using a multitude of database programs (such as MS-Access) and uploaded to your server after any changes (or even accessed directly, depending on the permissions that are set).

Taking all of the above factors into account, we eventually settled on two hosting providers for our needs.

We would however, recommend that you look at these one of these three low cost hosting solutions (which although based in America, are available worldwide): iPowerWeb, Globat and GoDaddy.  These all offer the same reliability and access speed as any other web hosting company, but pack a lot of features into a low price.  We have used these for a number of years without any issues and in particular have found their free technical support excellent (and always quick to respond), with a willingness to assist with scripts that do not work for whatever reason as well as server related queries.  GoDaddy is especially useful for hosting websites which rely heavily on scripting, such as ASP.Net based websites and ones which require full MS SQL access.