Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Should i continue with free hosting?

[iamzen]

I set up a free account with 100webspace a year back. The site is small with about 50 pages. Now it is beginning to receive some decent traffic - about 50 a day - from organic sources.

My question is - should i continue hosting with them till my site begins to receive serious traffic or do i shift now to avoid any issues later? I am concerned because a few days of downtime during shifting for a well trafficked site may have negative effect on the site's business, but at the same time i am tempted to keep hosting with them as i have not got any technical issues in this one year of hosting.

[Justin]

If you're intending on having the site get any amount of traffic (to where it is indexed and ranked), then yes I would suggest moving it over sooner rather then waiting and doing it later on.

That being said if you provide us with the budget you're looking at the community will be able to direct you a bit better on who to look at for hosting your site.

[Jesse_613]

If you have had no problems, then I'd leave it. Moving a site is no problem. Unless it is something like a forum. Then you will lose posts in the process, but that's about it. A site can be moved with zero downtime easy.

Edit: Justin did bring up a good point about getting indexed though. You could use a good inexpensive host such as hostgator.com. You will not use a lot of resources being a small site under 50 visitors a day.

[Jeff Bee]

It depends on the nature of your website.

Moving to shared hosting can give you some extra resources to ensure that your website never gets suspended for going over your limits. You can also invest in a domain name (yoursite.com) so you can direct people to something more professional than freehosting999.com/users/yoursite.

The downtime you would experience is zero in the case of normal websites. As a previous poster said, a forum would lose posts in the conversion unless you turned it to read-only for the length of the move (24 hours for DNS to propagate properly).

Do you have a budget? You can get a domain for a little over 5 bucks a year and hosting for a few bucks a month.

[angel_ivy]

Do you expect the traffic to your website increase? If yes best move to a paid hosting. Since your ranking is still not that high, better move it now rather than wait till your ranking and traffic are very high.

[njoker555]

50 a day isn't really a lot - I'd recommend you keep recent backups and you could just stick to where you are right now. If you have a few bucks to spare every month, then going paid may be the wa to go.

[SiberForum]

I suppose you need to understand that free web hosting is the one for the small web sites. If you are tight there I suppose that just another bell for you to move to the paid solution, unless you are not afraid to lose everything one day

[babysimba]

50 a day is not a lot. You better stay with free hosting.

[Jhig]

Thought 50 a day is not a lot of traffic, if you are expecting an increase of traffic in the near future you should go ahead a set up inexpensive hosting with a reputable host.

If you are not expecting much more traffic or your site is not "mission critical", then stay with free hosting

[seanray]

This is pretty much depends, if your free hosting will display some advertisement on your web site, and feel this might impact the user experience of your web site, you should consider to get a paid one.

Another factors is how important your site is. As free web hosting usually is not reliable enough, and they also are not responsible for the lost of data, your site might be in a risk to be lost or deleted at any time. If you really care about your site, then a paid one will be a good choice.

[James Ferguson]

Hi
If you want to improve your traffic status for your website so you should go with paid dedicated hosting service. I think it will be beneficial for your site hosting and for traffic also.

[laswatech]

You can very well transfer your website with zero downtime, so that shouldnt be a problem. 50 per day is not much and you can stick on with your free webhost.

[dazmanultra]

I think if your website is important to you, you should consider paying some money for the hosting. You should receive improved reliability, features and customer support.

[ldcdc]

Originally Posted by njoker555

50 a day isn't really a lot - I'd recommend you keep recent backups and you could just stick to where you are right now. If you have a few bucks to spare every month, then going paid may be the wa to go.

Very good, concise advice.

[Radejr]

Well if you don't plan on making any updates for a day or two you could open a new account with someone and then setup everything then transfer the domain and have virtually no downtime.